The West Africa Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted
Land Use (WASCAL) is to train about 3,000 research scientists by the
year 2020.
This is intended to contribute to efforts by member countries of WASCAL
to fight the effects of climate change on the West African sub-region
and also improve the resilience of West African countries to climate
change and climate variability.
The Director, Capacity Building, WASCAL, Professor Janet Olatundun
Adelegan, gave the hint yesterday, when she presented a brief on
WASCAL’s capacity-building programme, during the opening ceremony of a
sub-regional consultative meeting on climate change in Accra.
The two-day meeting was attended by representatives from four West African countries – The Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria and Ghana.
“In West Africa we have a population of about 348 million and looking at
what WASCAL has done so far, producing about 200 research scientists,
our projection is to have about 3,000 climate scientists by the year
2020,” Prof. Adelegan said.
She explained that the centre was expected to organise short courses and
workshops to complement the major courses which would be demand-driven
and focused on the priorities of countries in the sub-region, so as to
make them relevant.
Essence of meeting
The Executive Director of WASCAL, Dr Laurent G. Sedogo, said the meeting
was the last of three sub-regional consultative meetings that were
“aimed at identifying common research and capacity building needs of
different member countries for consideration in a final regional meeting
in a few months” in Ouagadougou.
He said WASCAL had commissioned national and regional consultative
meetings and had so far held 14 of such , to solicit the inputs of
partners and customers for their research agenda for 2017 to 2020.
“Our overarching objective is to integrate, as much as possible, the
research and capacity-building needs expressed by our partners into our
research agenda, so as to make our research findings and the climate
services relevant to the needs of the ECOWAS region,” he stated.
Sense of ownership
The Deputy Head of Mission and Head of the Economic Section of the
German Embassy, Mr Bernhard Abels, who was the special guest of honour,
said the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and Germany
wished that through the consultative workshops, member countries would
develop a high sense of ownership of the WASCAL programme and agenda.
He said the BMBF also hoped that African countries would increasingly
commit human and financial resources to achieve the ultimate goal of
significantly reducing the effects of climate change and climate
variability on human and environmental systems.
Citing some of the effects of climate change on the West African
sub-region, Mr Abels said, “As the main source of livelihood for
majority of the populace, rain-fed agriculture is becoming unattractive
and unbeneficial for millions of smallholder farmers due to factors such
as delayed start of rains, long spells during the season and declining
soil fertility.”
He indicated that it was to reduce the impact of climate change that
over €30 million had already been invested in infrastructure, scientific
equipment, capacity building and research by German and African
scientists in the last five years.