By Iddi Yire
Accra, July 29, GNA – Professor Nathaniel Boso, Director, Centre for Applied Research and Innovation in Supply Chain – Africa,(CARISCA), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), has called for collaboration between academia and industry to spur Africa’s socio-economic growth.
He said there was an opportunity for academia and industry to collaborate in research the universities conducted on problems and challenges businesses faced.
Prof Boso made the appeal on Monday in his opening remarks at the CARISCA’s 2024 Supply Chain Business Forum and Exhibition in Accra.
The two-day event, which is being organised by CARISCA, KNUST in collaboration with the Arizona State University, is a platform that brings together industry professionals, supply chain experts, entrepreneurs, and solution providers.
It aims to advance and promote supply chains by facilitating knowledge exchange, showcasing innovative solutions, and fostering collaborations.
The event focuses on enhancing supply chain efficiency, sustainability, and competitiveness across Africa, offering insights into the latest industry trends and technologies while providing valuable networking opportunities.
Touching on logistics supply chain companies that were involved in moving goods and services from wherever they were located to the final consumer, Prof Boso said they were looking at how they (academia) work with industry to make sure that they (industry) were effective and efficient in delivering goods and services across the economy.
He said one the innovative systems they had also tried was to develop an index that was focused on tracking logistics activities across the economy as an alternative to traditional gross domestic product (GDP) measure of an economy, which was much based on expenditure.
“But we are also collaborating with industry to come out with new ways of tracking economic activities across the country; and here we are looking at transportation, we are looking at inventory, we are looking at warehousing and we have a mode on that, we believe truly capture the supply side of inflation,” Prof Boso stated.
He said when on inflation, consumer expenditure and the cost of living were being amplified but they were looking at the supply side of inflation to the extent that inefficiencies in the supply chain cost prices to go up.
“So, this is one of the innovative outcomes of our collaboration with industry, and we are doing this in collaboration with our partners in the United States, the Arizona State University, the KNUST and a whole lot of industry partners, including the Chartered Institute of Supply and Purchasing and the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT),” he said.
“This is what we have been doing over the last four years and we think that this Forum offers an opportunity for us to interact, network more to come out with more innovative things for the future.”
Professor Dale S. Rogers, Principal Investigator and Executive Director of the CARISCA Project and ON Semiconductor Professor of Business at the Supply Chain Management Department at Arizona State University, said the key thing they want to come of the Accra Forum was that they would want to link academia, industry and policy makers because in order to solve challenges in facing Africa’s Supply Chain Management, they would need all three of those institutions working together.
He reiterated that the human capital in Ghana and across Africa was second to none; saying “one of the great resources we have here are smart people… we’ve got first class people from KNUST working with me on an artificial intelligence project in the supply chain”.
“The kids that are here can do the exact same stuff as the kids in Europe, the US or China.”
Madam Ruby Amegah, Vice President, Starbucks, who delivered the keynote address spoke on the topic “The Odyssey of Coffee and Cocoa Beans—From African Soil to Global Cup”.
She underscored the role that farmers played in a nation’s socioeconomic development; declaring that “For us, we need the farmers, they are the source of the ingredients that we use, so, we want to understand what is it that they need from us in order plant their coffees and supply the green coffee that we need”.
She pointed out that relationships were very important in their supply shain.
Prof Oke Adegoke of the Arizona State University and Senior Technical Advisor to CARISCA, said there was no good integration between business and academia in Africa, even though academia had a lot to offer businesses.
He said businesses had problems, but the challenge was that they don’t trust academia; saying “there are so many problems that academia can proffer solutions to, the issue of intra African trade is one, transportation infrastructure is another one, and the problem of making sure that goods are delivered on time is another one”.
CARISCA is a partnership between KNUST and Arizona State University with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
GNA