KIU, Western Campus – KIU School of Pharmacy is currently participating in the East Africa Pharmatech, pharmaceutical and healthcare exhibition, which is happening at the Uganda Manufacturer’s Association (UMA) show grounds in Lugogo, Kampala.

The exhibition, which started on March 22 and ends tomorrow March 24, gives KIU a platform to showcase its various achievements and areas of strength in terms of pharmaceutical activities.

According to the Dean, School of Pharmacy Dr. Sharon Igbinoba, the team representing KIU at the exhibition aims at attaining more visibility and marketability for KIU on the local and international market.

“We aim to achieve more KIU visibility and marketability as well as getting collaborations with different stakeholders,” Dr. Igbinoba told this website.

“For example, we already got a company that would like to collaborate with us to grow Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood) for exportation,” she further revealed. Sweet wormwood is an anti-malarial.

KIU is represented by a six-man team, with two lecturers and two students from Western Campus as well as two members from Main Campus.

Dr. Igbinoba said that the biggest highlight of KIU’s exhibition is the medicinal plant garden, which generated a lot of interest from many of the visitors to the KIU stall.

“The majority of the people that came around were very interested in KIU’s botanical garden and would want KIU to start selling their grown herbal medicines to them,” she said.

She added that KIU is also benefitting a lot from the exhibition in terms of knowledge and pharmaceutical technologies.

“We are learning about new pharmaceutical technologies and changes in industrial trends. We are also acquiring information about new pharmaceutical products and herbal medicines,” she said.

To round it off, the guest of honour Dr. Diana Atwiine, who is the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, appreciated KIU as one of the universities that build human resource capacity of the pharmaceutical sector in Uganda.