‘Make good use of engineers produced by KNUST’
The immediate past Provost of the College of Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Professor S.I.K. Ampadu, has called on the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) to make good use of the about 1,000 Engineers produced by the KNUST annually to help in national development.
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The KNUST, he said, produces between 1,000 and 1,200 engineers, most of whom were still home while others had joined the Unemployed Graduates Association at the expense of national development.
Speaking to the Daily Graphic at the opening of the 5th African Young Geotechnical Engineering Conference at the KNUST in Kumasi, Prof. Ampadu observed that the country faced integrated waste management problems that could be addressed with the expertise of these graduate engineers.
He said collecting waste – both solid and liquid – and keeping them at their final disposal sites required professional expertise and that waste departments of the MMDAs would need to collaborate with the College of Engineering of the KNUST and other public training institutions to make a headway.
Platform to build network for African young engineers
The 5th African Young Geotechnical Engineering Conference was attended by young African engineers from eight countries, with resource persons from the United States, Australia and Japan, to devise ways for developing countries to tap the knowledge of African young engineers for development.
The conference also provided participants with an opportunity to build local capacity and networks for future development in engineering.
Prof. Ampadu emphasised the need for the participants to understand what they had been trained for, especially in Africa, against the backdrop of rapid population growth and urbanisation.
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He expressed worry that developing countries were failing to advance due to the springing up of more buildings, congestion in the cities, inadequate roads, improper waste management and poor management of energy.
He, therefore, called for the adoption of pragmatic engineering approaches to solve these challenges.
Saturated soil for road construction
The Associate Vice-President of Research and Graduate Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Dr Charles Wang Wai Ng, welcomed the participants and said engineers around the globe were resorting to the use of saturated soil in road construction in developing countries.
He recommended that African young geotechnical engineers should always seek more information and explore effective ways of using engineering to develop roads.
One of the participants, Ms Denise Samuella Boadu, who made a presentation on the “Effects of Natural Fibre on Strength and Properties of Saturated Soil, recommended the use of saturated soil to the Ministry of Roads and the Ghana Highway Authority as being comparatively less expensive to cement and other materials used for road construction.