African Ministers of Higher Education and Key Stakeholders are set to meet in Banjul for the 8th Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence for Development Impact (ACE Impact) Regional Workshop.
The meeting will bring together the Ministers and government representatives from the 11 participating African countries as well as the leaders of the fifty-three (53) Centers of Excellence.
This was made known in a statement jointly issued and made available to Voice of Nigeria in Abuja by the Association of African Universities (AAU), the French Development Agency and the World Bank.
At the workshop, the Ministers of Higher Education and project government representatives from the 11 participating countries along with key partners will take stock of the progress made so far on ACE Impact and make recommendations for the sustainability of the project.
The meeting seeks to provide implementation support and share global best practices with centers on the project objectives, especially development impact, entrepreneurship and innovation, gender initiatives, digital transformation, and institutional impact activities.
The workshop is to foster an environment of knowledge sharing and networking between the centers and relevant agencies, providing in-person collaborative opportunities for the exchange of regional knowledge.
The statement added that the workshop will be preceded by a closed-door Ministerial Committee meeting on 14th November 2022.
Students Participation
In line with students’ participation in the high-level meeting, winners of the maiden edition of the Student Innovation Research Award (SIRA) will be recognized.
The Best 15 ACE impact students had been competitively selected for the SIRA awards and they will be awarded during the closing ceremony for outstanding competitive projects that offer solutions and innovative ideas in transformative research and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Furthermore, students from the University of Applied Science, Engineering, and Technology (USET) in The Gambia will be given the opportunity to share their innovative research outputs through a poster exhibition scheduled to hold on the 15th of November 2022.
Others to attend the ACE bi-annual meeting are subject matter experts, key higher education stakeholders, policy think tanks, and partners such as the World Bank, the French Development Agency (AFD) and the Association of African Universities (AAU).
ACE initiative
The Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence (ACE) is a World Bank initiative in collaboration with governments of participating countries to support higher education institutions specializing in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), Agriculture, Health, Environment and Social Science/Applied Science and Education.
Following successes recorded by ACE 1&2, the World Bank, and the French Development Agency (AFD) in collaboration with the African governments, launched the ACE Impact Project in 2019 to further strengthen post-graduate training and applied research in existing fields and support new fields that are essential for Africa’s economic growth.
Under ACE Impact, there are 53 ACES specializing in STEM agriculture, health, environment and social/applied science and education.
Olusola Akintonde
