Dr Israel Dunmade, Associate Professor of Environmental Science from Mount Royal University, was awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to travel to South Africa to work with University of Johannesburg (UJ) and University of Witwatersrand to collaborate on the research project entitled “Development of Life Cycle Assessment Database for South Africa”.
The Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) database development project would involve implementation of ISO appropriate inventory analysis questionnaires that would be used to gather information from people in industry as well as in academia spaces. The Fellowship will aid in the development of the database and also propose the submissions of the data collected to commercial lifecycle inventory (LCI) databases. This is done with the view that, South Africa LCA database will be incorporated into internationally used LCA commercial packages.
Prof Esther Akinlabi and Prof Michael Daramola (the co-hosts) will collaborate with Dr. Dunmade in the areas of data collection, preparation, analysis and other aspects of database development. The expected impacts include capacity building for lifecycle assessment at UJ and University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. This project also offers possible long term collaborative research opportunities between Dr. Dunmade, Prof. Akinlabi, Dr Madushele, Prof. Daramola and other colleagues in their three universities. On the long run, the project will facilitate the use of LCA in making informed choices and in developing sustainability policies necessary to improve our environment.
“This project is expected to open collaboration between UJ, Mount Royal University and Wits in the areas of research, graduate education and innovative academic practice. The collaboration will further strengthen the existing memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the three institutions,” said Prof Esther Akinlabi, a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering Science, in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, UJ.
Dr Israel Dunmade’s project is part of a broader initiative that will pair 51 African Diaspora scholars with one of 43 higher education institutions and collaborators in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda to work together on curriculum co-development, research, graduate teaching, training and mentoring activities in the coming months.
The visiting Fellows will work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include controlling malaria, strengthening peace and conflict studies, developing a new master’s degree in emergency medicine, training and mentoring graduate students in criminal justice, archiving African indigenous knowledge, creating low cost water treatment technologies, building capacity in microbiology and pathogen genomics, and developing a forensic accounting curriculum. To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several program alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.
The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its sixth year, is designed to increase Africa’s brain circulation, build capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa, the United States of America and Canada. It is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council. A total of 385 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013.
Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars (individually or in small groups) and cover the expenses for project visits of between 21 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance.
See full list of 2018 projects, hosts and scholars and their universities.
