Burkina Faso – Page 4

Announcement: Application Process for Doctoral and Master’s Fellowships at the Graduate Studies Program Started

November 30, 2015
Bénin / Burkina Faso / Côte d'Ivoire / Gambia / Ghana / Mali / News / Niger / Nigeria / Sénégal / Togo / West Africa
By WASCAL
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Note: The call for application has been extended to January 22, 2016. Read more

WASCAL (West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use) is a large-scale research-focused Climate Service Center designed to help tackle severe challenges posed by climate change and thereby enhance the resilience of human and environmental systems to climate change and increased variability. It does so by strengthening the research infrastructure and capacity in West Africa related to climate change and by pooling the expertise of ten West African countries and Germany. Through the Graduate Studies Program WASCAL’s Capacity Building Program helps educate the next generation of scientists to attain an intimate knowledge of different climate related issues in order to help the region develop suitable management strategies.

The WASCAL Graduate Studies Program supports four Master’s and six Doctoral Programs implemented at ten lead Universities across West African countries. WASCAL provides full scholarships to the Doctoral and Master’s students in all the ten lead Universities with comprehensive training and research support. Doctoral students may spend up to six months at a host institution in Germany. The language of instruction is English. English and French language training programs are provided for all graduate students. Graduate students have access to the research facilities set up through WASCAL funding and located at various watersheds in West Africa. German partner universities collaborate with the Doctoral and Master’s Programs in the areas of curriculum development, visiting professorships and co-supervision of graduate students.

The WASCAL Graduate Studies Program offers its students:

High quality research and education on climate change and its impact on human environmental systems.
Up to six months at a host institution in Germany (Doctoral Programs only!)
Interdisciplinary working approach
International lecturers and supervisors
English language classes
Scholarship and research budget, including a personal laptop computer

Doctoral Programs

West African Climate System
Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Nigeria
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form and the recommendation letter

Climate Change and Water Resources
Université d’Abomey-Calavi (UAC), Benin
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form

Climate Change Economics
Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD), Senegal
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form

Climate Change and Biodiversity
Université Felix Houphouet Boigny (formerly Université de Cocody‐Abidjan), Côte d‘Ivoire
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form

Climate Change and Land Use
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana
Apply now: Download call for applications and referee form and application form

Climate Change and Agriculture
L’Institut Polytechnique Rural de Formation et de Recherche Appliquée, (IPR-IFRA), Mali and University of Cape Coast, Ghana
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form

Time Frame

The time frame of the doctoral programs is three and a half years. During the first three months, students take English and/or French language classes and common courses at the language centers. During the next 6 months student participate in lectures at their Graduate Research Program and prepare their proposals. After their proposals have been approved by their supervisors, the students conduct their field research for 12 to 24 months. For the remaining period of time, students will write up their thesis and are offered to spend up to six months at a German host institution.

Requirements

Candidates applying for a Doctoral Program must have a Master’s degree in a relevant discipline in addition to a BSc degree (second class upper division).
Citizenship in one of the WASCAL member country (Bénin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Sénegal, Togo)
Five credits including Mathematics and English Language that are also equivalent to Francophone university grading system
Gender-balanced selection decision
Applicant should show proficiency in English Language.
Meet additional requirement of the lead university

Master’s Programs

Climate Change and Human Security
University of Lomé, Togo
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form

Climate Change and Education
University of The Gambia (UTG), The Gambia
Apply now: Download application form

Climate Change and Energy
Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey (UAM), Niger
Apply now: Download call for applications and application form

Climate Change and Adapted Land Use
Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria
Apply now: Download application form

Time Frame

The time frame for the Master’s programs is two years. During the first year students participate in the course program of their Graduate Research Program and work on their research outline. Research will be conducted during the second year within a period of six to nine months. Students finish the program with writing up their thesis during the last three to six month.

Requirements

Candidates applying for Master’s Program must have a minimum BSc degree (second class upper division) in a discipline relevant to the respective program.
Citizenship in one of the WASCAL member country (Bénin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Sénegal, Togo)
Five credits including Mathematics and English Language that are also equivalent to Francophone university grading system
Gender-balanced selection decision
Applicant should show proficiency in English Language.
Meet additional requirement of the lead university

Application Process

Note: The call for application has been extended to January 22, 2016. Read more

The application process is handled jointly by WASCAL and the individual Graduate Programs. Applications can be submitted online to any of the Graduate Studies Program for the 2015/2015 season until January 8, 2016. The details of the application process can be found at the respective programs pages (see linkes above). Shortlisted candidates will be contacted and invited for interviews by January 15, 2016.

More information on the Graduate Studies Program and on open applications can be found here or at the respective universities websites.

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Award for paper: Field Facts for Crop Insurance Design

The paper “Field Facts for Crop Insurance Design: Empirical Evidence from Southern Burkina Faso” written by Dr. William M. FONTA, Dr. Safiétou SANFO, Dr. Boubacar IBRAHIM, and Dr. Boubacar BARRY was selected by Making Finance Work 4 Africa (MFW4A) to receive one of two awards to be given at the African Microfinance Week. The award is donated with EUR 6.000.

A certificate from the Africa Development Bank will be presented during the 1st Plenary Session of the African Microfinance Week “Accelerating innovative rural and agricultural finance in Africa”, that will take place on Tuesday 30 June from 11.30 am to 1 pm. Dr. Boubacar Barry will accept the award on behalf of the whole team of authors.

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Can commercial cellphone providers help to gather high quality rainfall information?

The knowledge of spatio-temporal distribution of precipitation is of crucial importance for the scientific understanding of the regional hydrological cycle and for sustainable water management. High quality rainfall information is the prerequisite for e.g. decision making in agriculture, the operation of hydroelectric power production and also urban flash flood warning. Installation- and maintenance costs in combination with limited financial abilities make it more and more difficult for national meteorological and hydrological services to provide precipitation information in requested high spatial and temporal resolution on a country wide scale, particularly in West Africa.

It is the microwave links operated by commercial cellphone providers that may allow now for highly valuable complementary precipitation information: the attenuation occurring between emitted and received power at the link antennas highly correlates with precipitation intensity along the link-paths. Advantage is that the technical infrastructure, i.e. the MW-link network, is already in operation and maintained by the companies. While data retrieval techniques and respective algorithm development has proceeded in Europe and the Near East in the last years, great potential is particularly seen in the general data scarce region of West Africa. WASCAL has now co-sponsored and organized a 4-day workshop in Ouagadougou on this technique, jointly with experts from the University of Ouagadougou, Germany (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and University of Augsburg), France (IRD and GET), The Netherlands (University of Wageningen and KNMI), Israel (Tel Aviv University), and Switzerland (EAWAG), forming jointly the Raincell Africa initiative.

87 students, scientists and met service representatives from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Togo, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon and the US followed the scientific presentations of the international experts and a 2 day training course offered by the experts from KIT, University of Wageningen and KNMI. Topics included the physics of microwave attenuation, the detection of wet and dry periods under a noisy received signal level, and the explicit rain rate estimation. Further focus was set on the effect of wet antennas and the spatial interpolation of individual link information. Algorithms were based on two public domain and open source programming languages, namely Python and R. It is particularly the use of these free open source software environments that can foster a wide distribution and application of the tools at West African universities, research institutes, met services or climate service centers like WASCAL. First MW-link attenuation data were already made available from TELECEL to the University of Ouagadougou. Representatives of the participating cellphone company TELMOB/ONATEL started now to elaborate further steps jointly with WASCAL and the University of Ouagadougou to realize an automatic and even countrywide data access, -analysis and -use.

Prof. Dr. Harald Kunstmann and Dr. Boubacar Barry, WASCAL, organizing committee of the Raincell Africa Workshop.