EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Tuesday, 9th August,, 2022
Mr Ebenezer Okletey Terlabi, Ranking Member on Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation has called on research institutions to start quantifying their research work for government to recognize their contributions towards the growth of the economy.
He explained that if research institutions in their narrative can put figures to what they do and the savings the country would make because of their study it would be easy for them to get extra support from their financiers especially the government for their work.
“It is about time we start quantifying research…we start putting figures to what we do so that our financiers which is government would recognize our contribution to the growth of the economy,” he said.
Mr Terlabi said this when members of Parliament’s Select Committee on Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation visited the Food Research Institute (FRI) and Water Research Institute (WRI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Accra.
The Daily Searchlight agrees absolutely with the Member of Parliament. It would seem that over the years, government has continued to pump money into research institutions without the commensurate outturn. We believe that the time may have come to challenge these research institutions to begin telling the financier and the general public how much the investments made in them have improved the lot of the general public, as well as helped to improve the general economy of the country.
We believe that that is the only way that the financier can justify further investments in these institutions.
Secondly, we believe that these institutions should justify the faith reposed in them by coming out with information on what they have been doing all these years and how the research has been economically beneficial to the general public.
They ought, in good faith, to accept this challenge.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Tuesday, 9th August,, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
