Ghana, Germany collaborate to train PhD Students…in Health Sciences, others
The School of Public Health of the University of Ghana, Legon, is collaborating with the German Heidelberg University Hospital, and other institutions, to train more PhD students in Health Sciences, and Development Studies in Ghana and Africa as a whole.
The collaboration focuses mainly on sponsoring and training PhD students in the area of Health Research within the School of Public Health, College of Health Sciences and students in the field of Development Studies at the Institute for Statistical Social and Economic Research (ISSER).
The overall goal of this collaboration is to contribute to alleviating the age old problem of brain drain, which confronts Africa, including Ghana, and to bridge the fragmentations of research capacities, especially in the areas of Health Research and Development Studies in both the sub-region and the European partner institutions.
To this end, the Ghana-Ghana Center for Development Studies and Health Research has been inaugurated at the University of Ghana, Legon, in Accra.
The Center is aimed at bringing academic institutions in the developing countries, and their developed counterparts together in partnership, to build teaching and research capacity through the training of students in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In his welcome address, the Provost of the College of Health Sciences, Professor Aaron Lawson, welcomed the collaborations, as they had the potential of enhancing the human resource development of the beneficiary countries.
Presenting an overview of the program of Health Research, Professor Ernest Aryeetey, Executive Director of ISSER, stressed that the program was designed to address the fragmentation in health research, as well as developing capacities and human resource problems in public health, social sciences and health policy, clinical sciences and laboratory-based sciences.
According to him, the program would enable PhD students to have solid training in the core disciplines of the students' PhD area, by combining training in Ghana with training and attachments to Northern PhD partner institution, for obtaining additional research skills or technical skills in the students' area of specialisation.
The program would also develop and teach study units, aimed at building leadership qualities in the students, such as grant writing, research ethics, fund raising, public speaking, and presentation skills, he added.
The Executive Secretary of the National Council for Tertiary Education, Mr. Paul Effah, noted the establishment of the center further met two vital criteria, namely the promotion of the international dimension of the University of Ghana, and the development of multi-disciplinary research with enormous potential for addressing societal problems.
He, however, regretted that the overall research performance of African universities had not been very encouraging, to the extent that only a few African universities featured among world-class universities, defined predominantly by the output of their research, the size of postgraduate student population, and the quality of graduates produced.
Among the reasons for the poor performance of scientific and applied research, are the lacks of scientific and technological research infrastructure, inadequate funding and low postgraduate student population in African Universities, Mr. Effah mentioned.