The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has boosted science in Africa by making a US$20 million grant to help build independent scientific academies on the continent.

The money, which will be distributed by the US National Academies, will be used to train staff in African academies to organize research and conferences, to network with governments and other institutions, to use computers and to raise funds.

The Seattle-based Gates foundation hopes that the initiative will help African scientists to influence countries' policies on public health, agriculture and the environment.

“The ultimate goal of this initiative is to help each participating academy achieve, by the end of a ten-year period, a well-developed and enduring capacity to provide credible policy advice for its nation,” says Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The US National Academies will later this year select three science academies in Africa as lead partners for the initiative. The money will also support an alliance of African science academies, which will hold symposia and run collaborative workshops.

The grant is “tremendous news”, says Mohamed Hassan, president of the Nairobi-based African Academy of Sciences and director of the Trieste-based Third World Academy of Sciences.

Hassan, who was born in Sudan, says the challenge is to modernize Africa's academies and transform them from “clubs for old men” to younger, more active and inclusive bodies that can help to build scientific capacity and address the continent's problems.

Africa's population is rapidly approaching 1 billion, but fewer than 30,000 African-born PhD-level scientists work there, and currently independent scientific academies operate in only ten of the continent's 53 countries.