OWSD preaches multi-approaches to food insecurity, climate change

The Nigerian chapter of the Organisation for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) has said contemporary researches should address emerging issues like food insecurity, pandemics and climate change, among other issues.

It also stated that for women scientists to partake more actively in actualising food sufficiency and security, there should be multi-disciplinary researches, for which it called for statutory provisions that would strengthen research development programmes in the country.

Members of OWSD, with headquarters in Trieste, Italy, who spoke after their yearly general meeting at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike (MOUAU), Abia State, said that their international president and Nigeria’s coordinator were actively involved.

The Nigeria chapter Coordinator, Professor Ibiyinka Fuwape, said she was delighted that the meeting and its preceding fifth biennial conference was successfully held virtually and non-virtually despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the host coordinator at MOUAU chapter, Professor Olayinka Nwachukwu, hundreds of members from different OWSD branches in the country participated in the meeting that featured about 200 research paper presentations during the technical sessions which report was presented by the committee chairperson, Prof. Franca Elechi Asawalam, who is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration) of the host MOUAU.

In the keynote address on ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling,’ the Executive Director of the Ghana-based Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Dr Yemi Akinbamijo, acknowledged that women scientists had achieved excellence in all spheres of science, and stressed the need to urgently focus on the researches that could actualise food sufficiency/security.