Zoomlion opens Sanitation and Waste Management University in Accra
The first university dedicated to the training of sanitation and waste management professionals in Ghana and West Africa was officially opened yesterday.
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The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST)–Africa Institute of Sanitation and Waste Management (K-AISWAM) is a collaboration between Zoomlion Ghana Limited, a waste management company, and the KNUST.
At a colourful ceremony at the university’s campus at Ajiriganor in Accra, the first batch of students to undertake degree programmes took the matriculation oath to signify their admission to the university.
First Batch Of Students
In all, 184 students, including 160 undergraduates and 24 postgraduates, have been admitted to the university. The university will also offer diploma and certificate programmes in Sanitation Management and Environmental Sciences, including Environmental Science, Environmental and Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Meteorology and Climate Science, Sociology and Development and Settlement Planning.
Speaking at the opening of the university, the Chairman of the Council of State, Mrs Cecilia Johnson, who represented President John Dramani Mahama, said building the human resource capacity to analyse, design and implement solutions to address sanitation challenges would help meet Millennium Development Goal (MDG) seven, which is ensuring environmental sustainability.
The sub-target of MDG seven is aimed at reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by the end of 2015.
“While we are on course to improving access to safe drinking water, we remain far behind in making progress towards the sanitation goals,” she said, adding, “It is in this regard that private sector participation has become critical for us as a country.”
Low Human Resource Capacity
Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, a lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), said sanitation and waste management functions had been decentralised to the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs).
“We have not developed the capacity of the MMDAs to manage the waste, neither have we developed awareness of the localities and the public of the dangers of indiscriminate waste disposal and their real cost,” he said.
The K-AISWAM, he said, must not see itself as an exclusively academic enclave, insisting on qualifications and specialised admission requirements for all its programmes.
He said that was because the real movers and shakers of sanitation and waste management in Ghana were the uneducated and not-so-educated sanitation and waste management staff and employees of the MMDAs.
“The institution must specifically target them and formulate custom-made capacity-building programmes for them, so that their knowledge can be improved and their capacity built to enable Ghanaians to have real practical benefit from the institute’s existence,” he said.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Zoomlion Group, Dr Joseph Siaw-Agyapong, said the institute sought to be “one of a difference” with its hands-on educational facility that sought to provide education and training for practitioners in Ghana and Africa.
The Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Professor William Otoo Ellis, said Ghana and Africa were bedevilled with sanitation problems and the negative consequences such as diseases, flooding, land degradation, among others.
He said the problem was aggravated by the lack of financing in the sector, as well as the lack of quality human resource.
He said the university would afford KNUST the opportunity to enrol more students who had the desire to pursue programmes in the sciences.