The Center for Bioethics and Research (CBR) which now includes the West African Bioethics Training Program (WAB) was established in 2004 through a grant from the Fogarty International Center(FIC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with overarching goal of buiding bioethics capacity in West Africa. It does this by combining modern bioethics with exploration of the religious, socio-cultural, and colonial heritage of West Africa and uses the result to engage in bioethical inquiry and contribute to the global discourse on bioethics.

The practical avenues to achieve this are through promoting awareness in bioethics within the health research community, offering postgraduate training in bioethics and providing training and support to research ethics committees in West Africa.  The establishment of the Bioethics program was led by Professor Clement Adebamowo, who galvanized the nascent bioethics community in Nigeria to take advantage of emerging global opportunities in bioethics. The program was established in response to a variety of developments in biomedical research and bioethics locally and internationally.  The program started with a cross sectional survey of biomedical researchers in West Africa to document the need for training, advocacy and building awareness in research ethics. The respondents were quite enthusiastic about the prospect of such a program and quickly came together to implement it.

About the same time, an increasing number of University of Ibadan academic staff and other Nigerians were receiving training in US government funded bioethics training programs in the US, Canada, South Africa and other countries. Some of these trainees pioneered the organization of research ethics workshops in major Nigerian cities like Abuja, Ibadan and Lagos to create awareness about research ethics in the country. The trainees based in Ibadan formed the foundation faculty of the West African Bioethics Training Program.  WAB thus became a common ground for trainees from different foreign programs to utilize their training in bioethics locally thereby actualizing the efforts that had been since 1980 to create a research ethics regulatory infrastructure in Nigeria 1980.

Since its establishment, CBR has implemented a variety of activities that are fortifying and building the research ethics infrastructure and capacity, in Nigeria in particular but also globally.