By Edmund Smith-Asante
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| Prof. Janet Olatundun Adelegan (left), the Director, Capacity Building, WASCAL, adressing a workshop in Accra. |
The West Africa Science Service
Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) is to train about 3,000
research scientists by the year 2020.
The Director, Capacity Building,
WASCAL, Professor Janet Olatundun Adelegan, gave the hint yesterday, when she
presented a brief on WASCAL’s capacity-building programme, during the opening
ceremony of a sub-regional consultative meeting on climate change in Accra.
The two-day meeting was attended by
representatives from four West African countries – The Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria
and Ghana.
“In West Africa we have a population
of about 348 million and looking at what WASCAL has done so far, producing
about 200 research scientists, our projection is to have about 3,000 climate
scientists by the year 2020,” Prof. Adelegan said.
She explained that the centre was
expected to organise short courses and workshops to complement the major
courses which would be demand-driven and focused on the priorities of countries
in the sub-region, so as to make them relevant.
Essence of meeting
The Executive Director of WASCAL, Dr
Laurent G. Sedogo, said the meeting was the last of three sub-regional
consultative meetings that were “aimed at identifying common research and
capacity building needs of different member countries for consideration in a
final regional meeting in a few months” in Ouagadougou.
He said WASCAL had commissioned
national and regional consultative meetings and had so far held 14 of such , to
solicit the inputs of partners and customers for their research agenda for 2017
to 2020.
“Our overarching objective is to
integrate, as much as possible, the research and capacity-building needs
expressed by our partners into our research agenda, so as to make our research
findings and the climate services relevant to the needs of the ECOWAS region,”
he stated.
Sense of ownership
The Deputy Head of Mission and Head
of the Economic Section of the German Embassy, Mr Bernhard Abels, who was
the special guest of honour, said the Federal Ministry of Education and
Research (BMBF) and Germany wished that through the consultative workshops,
member countries would develop a high sense of ownership of the WASCAL
programme and agenda.
He said the BMBF also hoped that
African countries would increasingly commit human and financial resources to
achieve the ultimate goal of significantly reducing the effects of climate
change and climate variability on human and environmental systems.
Citing some of the effects of
climate change on the West African sub-region, Mr Abels said, “As the main
source of livelihood for majority of the populace, rain-fed agriculture is
becoming unattractive and unbeneficial for millions of smallholder farmers due
to factors such as delayed start of rains, long spells during the season and
declining soil fertility.”
He indicated that it was to reduce
the impact of climate change that over €30 million had already been invested in
infrastructure, scientific equipment, capacity building and research by German
and African scientists in the last five years.
This
story was first published by the Daily Graphic on April 2, 2016
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