Accra, Oct 20, GNA - A high level conference on connectivity among West and Central African higher education institutions has ended in Accra, with a call on the Vice Chancellors of the universities to interconnect globally with each other to promote learning and facilitate research.

The conference was organised by the Association of African Universities (AAU) to discuss the state of national and regional research and education networks development in the two Regions to be able to link up to global research networks.

At a ceremony to brief the press on the outcome of the conference in Accra on Tuesday, Mrs. Kathryn Toure, Regional Director of West and Central Africa Regional Office of the AAU, said the issue of interconnectivity among each other would help the tertiary institutions to be competitive globally.

She said the Vice Chancellors of the participating universities had a very critical role to play by connecting their institutions both at the regional and national levels to facilitate research and enhance the learning process of students.

Mrs Toure said "Research could only be improved if the various tertiary institutions in both the West and Central Africa are connected to a network".

She noted that Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria had been selected as the three major countries to be connected for the mean time, while other countries would be included gradually because the educational systems in those countries were far advanced. She said each country had to take up the responsibility to make sure that the national secretariat of the Research, Education and Networking Unit (RENU) had a major coordinator to facilitate and enhance the success of the connectivity.

She said, "We are in a global world and as a matter of fact, universities in the West and Central Africa lagged behind, adding that there was the need to take urgent measures soon to reshape the connectivity network system in the Regions to improve on academic research.

Dr Ousmane Moussa Tessa at the faculty of Sciences and Technology of Abdou Moumouni University, Niamey, Niger said the conference was basically to suggest measures that could be taken by national governments to significantly improve the connectivity of African higher education and research institutions at an affordable cost.

He said most of the tertiary institutions had access to the internet at a very high cost and that if they were connected it would help to reduce the cost of accessing the internet in their various universities.

Mr Tessa said as far as tertiary education was concerned, research was an essential requirement and that all links to access the world globally should be made available for students to expand their horizon especially in West and Central Africa.

Closing the conference earlier, the Deputy Minister of Education, Mr Joseph Annan, said he was happy the problem of connectivity in the universities had come up for discussion and asked the de9legates to work towards making the conclusions fruitful.