UDS Students pursue human development programme
More than 600 students of the University for Development Studies (UDS) are pursuing a new programme that focuses mainly on how to address the economic and health needs of the poor and vulnerable in society.
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The human development programme, which is being sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), prepares the students to use human development theories and concepts to identify and find solutions to development challenges.
The Environment Security and Human Development course, which began in 2013, is being run by the Institute for Continuing Education and Inter-Disciplinary Research (ICEIR) of UDS at the Master’s level, while the Faculty of Agribusiness and Communication Sciences offer its undergraduate component.
It is in line with efforts to promote equitable and inclusive growth through the development of northern Ghana under the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) and other development initiatives of the three regions of the north.
Relevance of the course
During an assessment visit to the ICEIR by a team from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Tuesday, the Director of ICEIR, Prof. Seidu Al-hassan, said the human development course was introduced following an agreement reached between the UDS and UNDP in 2012 on how to enhance teaching and learning in the university.
"We realised that one area that needed mainstreaming was human development into our curriculum," he said.
Prof. Al-hassan said the introduction of the human development programme was an effort by the UDS to help students apply whatever they were taught for the benefit of the society.
"The programme is designed to ensure that students become practical in terms of addressing challenges facing human beings instead of only dealing with theories and concepts," he said.
Besides, Prof. Al-hassan said, the UDS lecturers who had attended UNDP-sponsored courses on human development had gained mastery in human development research.
As a result, he said, the lecturers had made publications on human development in academic journals.
He said the running of the programme at the UDS was important as the three regions of the north had high levels of poverty; were negatively affected by migration of the youth to the south and also had a high number of school dropouts.
Experiences of students
Sharing their experiences, two graduate students of the UDS, Mr Theophilus Anolga Atia and Mr Nuvor Manasseh Kwaku, in separate remarks, described the course as very relevant to addressing the economic, health and social needs of the poor and vulnerable in the society.
The UNDP Communication Analyst, Mr Bossman Owusu, expressed his satisfaction with the results of the human development course so far.
The UNDP team later inspected the operations and use of an Internet hotspot that was established by the UNDP at the ICEIR.