Participants in a group photo during the Eco-Innovations workshop held at Golden Tulip Hotel
8th July 2019– AfrII in conjunction with Lancaster University-UK successfully held a workshop on Internationalization of Research through Eco-Innovation at Golden Tulip Hotel in Kampala.
The workshop involved key expertise in the areas of research and eco-innovations from Government, local universities, private Sector and local NGOs to discuss the role of Eco-Innovation in delivering green economic growth and sustainable development.
Discussions during the workshop raised key issues including the need for national policy level considerations of sustainable industrialization models that ensure green economic growth. It was also realized that the role of universities and research organizations is crucial in this framework but there is a disconnect between research and the research community and this poses a big challenge.
To avert this, it was realized that local universities need to become internationalized through building strategic partnerships that support multi, inter and trans-disciplinary approaches to research. In addition, ensuring strategic partnerships that research organizations have with the users of research, in this case industry, is also significant to meeting sustainable development.
Eco-Innovation has the capacity to deliver the mechanisms needed for green growth and sustainable development. Those mechanisms will be essential to producing commercially successful products, services and technologies that reduce the impacts of human activities on the environment, achieve more efficient/ responsible uses of natural resources and enhance societal, economic, and technological resilience to environmental pressures. For this to be achieved, however, there is need for qualitative research, resource mobilization driven by government policies with focus on sustainable solution oriented research models to bridge gaps between the academia and industry.
