Ghana to host German-West African Centre for Global Health

Ghana is set to host the German-West African Centre for Global Health and Pandemic Prevention.

The German Academic Exchange Service, in a statement, indicated that the German-West African Center will be part of eight centres worldwide to fight global challenges.

The Service is funding the eight interdisciplinary centres.

Each centre is expected to receive up to 600,000 euros in funding per year, initially until 2025 with the option to extend it until 2030.

The German-West African Centre will see collaboration between the Berlin School of Public Health, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

Four centres will teach and research on climate issues, the other four on health issues and pandemics.

The Federal Foreign Office (AA) is funding the establishment of the centres by 2025 with around 22 million euros.

“The world is facing immense challenges in the 2020s: We can only master these together as a global community. In times of corona and the climate crisis, it is more important than ever that we have to protect ourselves from pandemics across borders and counteract the ever-increasing effects of the climate crisis.”

“The new Global Centers for Climate and Health enable the international scientific exchange that we need to find solutions to these existential challenges for mankind,” said Service’s President Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee said.

German universities with partners from the respective countries and in close cooperation with other German and international partner organizations applied for the establishment of the centres.

The selected centres will teach and research on an interdisciplinary basis and be in close contact with science, politics, business and civil society in order to ensure the transfer of new knowledge into practice.

In addition to Ghana, the four centres for health and pandemic preparedness are in Vietnam, Gabon and Cuba / Mexico.

They are to focus on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.

Its aim is to strengthen local skills for the prevention and treatment of communicable diseases and to improve crisis prevention, response and follow-up care.

For this purpose, the centres provide training in international master’s courses, PhD programs and further education and enable international exchange, also within the global south.

Source: citifmonline