Successful governments have failed to incorporate research results into the development of national policies and political party agendas. It is the reason many government programmes have failed and others are struggling.
Sustainable economic, social, and political advancement will continue to elude Ghanaians if successive governments continue to devalue research and development.
Ghana’s socioeconomic status, according to Dr. Anankware, has deteriorated in comparison to other countries that began on a similar or worse pedestal at the attainment of independence.
Dr. Jacob Pareechuga Anankware, Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Horticulture and Crop Production at the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR), stated this recently on the Day Break Upper East Show with A1 Radio’s Mark Smith.
“We have to make a conscious decision as people that the way to go is research and development. Look at Singapore and Malaysia. At the time Ghana gained independence, it was far ahead of Malaysia in every aspect. Compare Malaysia to Ghana as we speak. Compare Singapore to Ghana as we speak. They are a hundred times better, if not more, than us. Why? Look at China at the time. It was a poor country. Now, it is a superpower. You think America got to where it was because of wishful thinking? Russia didn’t get to where it is due to wishful thinking. It was a conscious effort. Decisions were taken by technocrats, forward-thinking people,” he said.
Dr. Anankware, disappointed by the decision of governments, expressed even more despondence that when scientists fund their own research that could lead to development, it is shelved by decision makers.
“You could see in those countries that they make good use of the intellectual resources available to them. They do not disregard them. They make good use of research. Most of the research that I have done and that fellow scientists have done is usually shelved. We keep losing our brains, our intelligent ones, to the West.”
“For me, governments have to make conscious efforts, and scientists have to begin to have an active role in politics,” he added.
Dr. J.P. Anankware attended Navrongo Secondary School (Navasco) from 2001-2004. He proceeded to the University for Development Studies from 2005-2009 (BSc Applied Biology), and served as a teaching assistant from 2009-2010. In 2009, he won a US$7000.00 grant with a scientific breakthrough at UDS for developing a natural control for major insect pests. He continued to the University of Ghana and pursued M.Phil. Entomology at the prestigious African regional Postgraduate Programme in Insect Science (ARPPIS) from 2010-2012. In the first semester, he won US$11,500.00 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to further improve his previous research on insect pests.
Prior to his graduation, he worked as a consultant at Vestergaard Frandsen (Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research), Legon from 2012 to 2013. At Vestergaard, he established the largest insectary in Ghana from scratch; developed rearing protocols for major storage pests and conducted bioassays for the popular deltamethrin-impregnated ZeroFly grain storage bag. Paarechuga resigned to pursue his PHD in Entomology at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the University of Nairobi in 2013 and graduated in 2016. Whiles pursuing his PHD, Paarechuga was the Deputy Country Director of Fish for Africa (an NGO specialised in rearing insects for protein in feed); he helped raised about €3 million Euros from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Swiss National Science Foundation and immediately resigned in August, 2014 and joined Aspire Food Group (An NGO rearing edible insects for human consumption) as the Ghana Country Director.
Dr. Paarechuga helped build Aspire Food Group from scratch with a US$1million grant from the Bill Clinton Global Initiative and the Hult Prize. He resigned in September, 2016 to concentrate and finish his PHD in November, 2016 and became the first and only entomophagical entomologist in Africa. Paarechuga is the Founder and CEO of AnePaare Farms (www.anepaarefarm.com); a global player in entomophagy (eating of insects) and a board chairman of Neat Eco-Feeds Ltd (www.neatecofeeds.com)
He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Michigan, USA, a 2017 Mandela Washington Fellow at the Purdue University, USA and a 2018 Humboldt Scholar at the Humboldt University in Germany. Paarechuga is currently pursuing his fourth Post-Doctoral fellowship at the New York University School of Medicine; focussing on Research Ethics and Integrity.
He once enrolled at the Oxford University in the UK and abandoned it to pursue other interests in Ghana.
He is currently working on a US$1.85 million DANIDA funded project on the nexus of agriculture, nutrition and infectious diseases among women and children and how edible insects can contribute to mitigating the injuriousness caused by iron-deficiency and anaemia.
He has successfully trained and empowered over 2000 farmers in the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, Ashanti and Eastern regions of Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Kenya to sustainably rear larvae of the African palm weevil (Rhynchophorus phoenicis), also called “akokono” in Akan, to improve their nutrition and income. He also rears larvae of the black soldier fly (Hermetia illuscens) as a cheap source of protein to replace fish meal and soybean meal in fish and poultry feed. This will make it easy for Ghanaian farmers to produce meat and fish cheaply.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
