‘Invest in research to promote national development’
The outgoing Vice Chancellor of the University for Development Studies (UDS), Prof. Haruna Yakubu, has urged the government to invest in research to promote national development.
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He said research and national development were "intertwined to the extent that it becomes impossible for nations to develop without making huge investment in it".
Addressing this year's edition of the Annual Inter-Disciplinary Conference (AIC) championed by the university, Prof. Yakubu said "pursuing and advancing knowledge is, therefore, one of the valuable tools that developing nations can adopt to emancipate themselves from the bondage of poverty and under development".
Intellectual forum
The AIC is an intellectual forum for the Institute for Continuing Education and Interdisciplinary Research (ICEIR) of UDS, which, according to the director of ICEIR, Prof. Seidu Al-hassan, "aims at promoting excellent academic research work that will lead to scholarly publications with the aim of influencing development policy".
This year's conference was organised on governance, science, technology and national development, with 66 abstracts received from 129 different researchers from various institutions, including the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, Savanna Agricultural Research Institute, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the University of Alabama in the United States.
Making reference to the recent strike by the Ghana Medical Association, Prof. Yakubu encouraged the government to commission a research into the recent industrial action by the association to determine its impact on the state.
He said such a research would "help enlighten not only policy makers, but also the medical doctors and the society at large to appreciate the issues at hand and implications (financial, economic and life) during such nationwide strikes".
The conclusions from such a research, he said, could inform the future actions of all parties involved in that unfortunate strike action.
Importance of research
While endorsing the importance of research, the Deputy Minister of the Upper West Region, Dr Mohammed Musheibu Alfa, said the government recognised the relevance of research to national development upon which it established the National Research Fund for academic institutions.
"It is, therefore, important that we all embrace this novel policy to help accelerate research activities in the country," he said.
He, however, noted that despite showing commitment to improving education by expanding access and devoting funds to research, the "government alone cannot carry the increasing burden of education, particularly research.
"It is based on this that I wish to call on the private sector to support activities of our tertiary and research institutions."
The Dean of the Tamale Campus of UDS, Prof. Herbert K. Dei, said funding for research needed to be reassessed.
In what appeared to be a reference to the controversial research allowance for university lecturers, Prof. Dei proposed that the government could always table a problem and fund the research towards solving those problems without touching the existing research allowance for university teachers.