Makerere University is set to launch the Environment for Development Initiative (EfD-Mak) Centre, the first of its kind in the country.
The EfD-Mak is a new Center at Makerere University established in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2018.
The Centre will be launched on 29th August 2019 at the Makerere University Main Campus where the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe will preside over as Chief Guest.
Representatives from the World Bank, EfD Kenya, Uganda Government Ministries and agencies are scheduled to grace the occasion.
The university now joins a global network of environmental economics research centers to contribute to effective management of the environment in the global South through applied research, institutional development, academic training and policy interaction.
EfD has 15 centers across the world sponsored by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), coordinated by the EfD Secretariat, a special Unit at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
EfD-Mak Centre started its full operations in the financial year 2019/2020 and it is managed by two colleges – College of Business and Management Sciences (CoBAMS) and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES).
The Centre is headed by Assoc. Prof. Edward Bbaale from CoBAM’s School of Economics, deputized by Prof. Johnny Mugisha, from CAES’ School of Agricultural Sciences.
The Centre’s vision is to become a hub for quality training, research and policy engagement in environmental economics and development in the Africa region and beyond.
The mission of the EfD-Mak Centre is to provide high quality policy-relevant research, graduate training support, policy engagement and outreach in the realm of environment and development economics in order to enhance sound environmental management and natural resource utilization for sustainable development.
The Centre will work with relevant government departments, the private sector, development partners and civil society to drive research and policy action that are underpinned by issues regarding environmental management and sustainable development.
The Center’s teaching, research, technical support and policy engagement targets the development of skills in priority areas including climate change, energy, food, forests, water, fisheries, agriculture and sustainable development.
The main activities to be undertaken by the Centre include; Enrolling Junior and Senior Research Fellows and conducting training and research in environmental economics; Establishing local and international research and policy networks with collaborating research institutions and policy makers in Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies as well as monitoring and evaluating the performance of the individual researchers.
The other activity is organizing international conferences, seminar series and meetings for Senior and Junior Research Fellows, academics, researchers and policy makers and Training researchers and staff in rigorous environmental policy analysis and frontier methodological approaches to environmental questions.
High-level policy dialogues with policy makers, private sector actors, non-government organizations, academia and civil society organizations will also be held by the center to exchange ideas and debate on the status, impact and direction of environmental policy in the country.
To enable relevant policy makers and government officials better appreciate environmental economics and mainstream environmental policy in their daily work, EfD-Mak Centre will conduct short courses and develop policy briefs out of every technical research for sharing.
The Centre will also organize policy tours, policy research workshops and fieldwork in the four regions of the country to bring on board environmental policy makers in government, environmental activists in the private sector and civil society organizations.
In addition, the EfD-Mak center will be conducting policy-research review dialogue and fieldwork in different government Ministries, Departments and Agencies as well as the private sector and civil society organizations to identify the policy gaps that need to be closed through empirical research and to bridge the gap between research and policy.
