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Matsuura: ‘will spare no effort’. Credit: UNESCO

Koïchiro Matsuura, the new director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), promised this week that his organization will “spare no effort” in backing poor countries prepared to draw up proposals for swapping debt relief for support for science.

Matsuura was speaking at a meeting of African leaders held on Monday (24 April) in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, to launch an anti-malaria campaign. “Without a scientific capacity of its own, Africa will not be able to tackle and overcome its endemic diseases,” he said.

The idea that African countries in particular should develop a strategy under which money earmarked for debt repayments could be channelled into supporting science was endorsed last summer at the World Conference on Science in Budapest, organized jointly by Unesco and the International Council for Science (see Nature 400, 8; 2000 ).

After the Budapest meeting, Unesco commissioned a report from two former officials of the World Bank on how this could be achieved. The report describes how scientists can integrate their demands into the policy packages put together by their governments under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, a plan drawn up jointly by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The report says, for example, that it is “essential” to develop an advocacy strategy within a country for supporting science and technology, given that “the bargaining for distribution of resources is an in-country process”.

In his speech, Matsuura said the report shows that it is feasible to integrate a science-funding component into negotiations on debt relief, “whatever stage [they] have reached”. He added that “debt relief for science should be seized on as an opportunity to strengthen local capacities in basic and applied research”.