The President observed that the COVID-19 pandemic had necessitated the need for countries to develop modern technologies and innovations to address issues confronting them.

The President made the call in a speech read on his behalf by the Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Dr KwakuAfriyie, at the 2^nd edition of the Annual Applied Research Conference of Technical Universities in Ghana, held at the Accra Technical University (ATU) yesterday.

“Ghana is at the crossroad and is calling all of us to action. We need our academics to stand up and lead us to develop Ghana. I urge you to direct your researchers to critical developmental issues such as sanitation, poverty alleviation and innovation development,”he said.

The conference was on the theme “Sustainable Technologies, Innovations and Entrepreneurial Development,” and attended by Vice Chancellors of various technical universities in the country, relevant stakeholders in the educational sector, government officials and researchers.

As a way of promoting and leading the innovation drive, the government, President Akufo-Addo said, had implemented programmes such as Technical Vocational Education Training (TVET) programmes and was prepared to add on to it.

While acknowledging the fact that some of the universities lacked the necessary resources to embark on research, the President assured them of the government’s preparedness to retool the research centres.

Additionally, he noted that the government expected a close collaboration between technical universities and industries for the needed transformation of industries, increased production and creation of jobs through innovation.

For her part, the Vice Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Prof. (Mrs) Rita Akosua Dickson, noted that the theme was vital in Ghana’s attainment of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9. 5 (b) which encouraged support for “Domestic Technology Development, Research and Innovation.”

She explained that national development could not be achieved without the conscious application of both indigenous and modern technologies for which the conference provided.

In furtherance, Prof. Dickson said changes were vital in the current age of technological advancement, and therefore urged institutions and individuals to take advantage of it in their operations.

She also underscored the need for more investment into industrialisation through academia-industry cooperation.

In his welcome address, the Vice Chancellor of the ATU, Prof. Samuel Nii Oda, said “in field of science and technology, no contribution is small. A simple observation may lead an innovative breakthrough that may be the beginning of a whole industry that employs thousands of our youth in Ghana and beyond and gives humankind a higher quality of living.”

He added that research should be part of “our culture” and for that reason the ATU had established a fund to help the researchers to team up with industries to come up with innovative ideas.

BY BENJAMIN ARCTON-TETTEY & MARYAM OMARU