Government pledges to provide Infrastructure for UDS

Bolgatanga, May 9, GNA - The Upper East Regional Minister, Mr. Mark Woyongo at the weekend announced that government would provide more infrastructure for the University for Development Studies (UDS) that has been neglected in the past years, to enable it to catch up with the other universities in Ghana.

He said government was committed to implementing the specific recommendations in the Anamuah-Mensah's report which included, accelerating the process of upgrading the Tamale Regional Hospital into a fully fledged Teaching Hospital to ensure that the school of medicine and allied health sciences was fully operational.

Mr. Woyongo was addressing a two-day seminar dubbed " Developmental Universities Seminar", organized by the UDS and sponsored by the Canadian International Development Research Centre(IDRC), for lecturers of the University in Bolgatanga.

The event that was under the theme "University Research and People Centred Developmental Needs in Ghana" was to empower participants to make research more relevant to the developmental needs of Ghana. The regional minister said that government would make a special allocation from the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETfund) for the accelerated development of the university.

Mr. Woyongo stressed that the establishment of the UDS was the brain-child of the present government and it would give much attention to it by providing adequate infrastructure to enable the university to achieve its mandate of providing action-oriented community-based education system and problem-based learning programmes in priority areas of national development.

He challenged the participants to come out with research that would be relevant to contemporary situations in Ghana.

Mr. Woyongo said that it was disturbing that research findings were shelved in libraries and research institutions and not being used for development purposes adding that there was the need to create appropriate fora to avail such research findings to the public. He indicated that the NDC in its manifesto proposed the holding of "Annual Ghana Science Congress" to focus on science and technology and their impact on the various sectors of the economy.

Mr Woyongo asked scientist and researchers to explore the possibilities of domesticating and reducing the gestation periods of some economic tress such as dawadawa and shea tress in the northern parts of Ghana.

The leader of the Developmental Universities of the South Project in Ghana, Dr Delali Dovie said the Canadian IDRC was sponsoring the programme because of the importance of research to development. He noted that developmental universities and institutions were crucial to national development since higher education was globally known to have a strong impact on economic growth. Dr Dovie appealed to government to ensure that research at universities was prioritized and research results made available for development.

He stated that this could only be achieved through appropriate national research strategy including fund-raising, reappraising existing science and technology policies and ensuring that development related policies were informed by good research and not intuition. "This is because governance and development strategies based on intuition rather than research are difficult to implement and bound to fail", he emphasized. The Seminar covered topics including Functioning, Challenges and Achievement of UDS Centre for interdisciplinary Research, Challenges and Achievement of a Developmental Science Faculty: the Case of Faculty of Applied Science, University Research and People Centred Needs, Improving the Efficiency of Inland Valley Rice Production in Northern Ghana and Potential of Manipulating Natural Occurring Micro organisms During Soyabean Khebab production to enhance its economic value. The rest were Hygienic Standard of Meat Handling in Tamale Metropolis and Controlling the Incidence of Bush Fires in the Traditional Belt of Ghana. 9 May 09