EfD-Mak Centre held a one-day training on Environmental Valuation, Evaluation and Accounting on 27th September, 2019. The training was held at the College of Business and Management Studies (CoBAMS and targeted experts from public and private sector including: government ministries, agencies, researchers, academic staff and students.
This was the first seminar and one of the main activities undertaken by EfD-Mak Centre following its official launch on 29th August, 2019.
The purpose of the training was to provide both theoretical and empirical basics of environmental analysis. Specifically, the training covered basic issues in environmental economics, valuation of environmental goods, evaluation of environmental goods and environmental accounting.
The training was officially opened by the Principal CoBAMS Dr. Bruno Yawe who welcomed the participants and hailed the CAES–CoBAMS partnership saying, a lot is expected including joint teaching for PhD in economics.
“I welcome you to Makerere University particularly to the CAES–CoBAMS collaboration, one of the biggest long journey of collaboration. I encourage you to attend with a purpose. Things that starts jokingly turn out
big. Put in your hearts, the sky can be the limit”, Dr. Yawe said.
The Director EfD-Mak Centre, Dr. Edward Bbaale said Makerere University recently launched the EfD-Mak Centre in August and in September, 2019 they were set to start undertaking research.
“But we found it necessary to organize a refresher course to highlight some of the techniques that we need to undertake research in environmental and natural resource economics.
For you to successfully train, there must be research to feed into training but also training creates a critical mass of professionals that are ready to undertake this research. So, this seminar was intended to highlight a few of the environmentally related techniques of analysis that we can use in research”, Dr. Bbaale said.
He said the center is set to run a number of research projects starting with an international conference in Columbia in November,2019 where some members who have been part of this training will be presenting.
“EfD works to maintain long term interaction with policy makers. We are organizing a policy dialogue sometime late October, 2019 where we are going to discuss with policy makers a few pertinent issues on policy gaps and advise government on what direction to take as far as protecting and management of natural resources is concerned. As researchers and academics we cannot work without policy makers because they are the consumers of our output”, The Centre Director said.
The Lead Instructor Peter Babyenda – an environmental economist at the School of Economics Makerere University said the workshop was majorly on opening the eye to stimulate research on environment.
“We can’t do research without data. When thinking together with EfD team, we realized that we need to talk about environmental valuation, evaluation and accounting so that people can be able to see which methods can be used.
This was an introduction where we are giving the general overview of the environmental issues. And then, if you now know that this is the environment, how do you get data on environment. You need the methods to evaluate”, Babyenda said.
He said Uganda as a country lacks reliable data on environment and climate that is why farmers are not doing well because they are not well informed because there are no machines for environmental data.
“So through this network we think government can buy these machines but as we are doing that, we still have the data from African Union that we can use. But the concern is to do with whether we have the human resources and capacity to interpret that data to advise the farmers.
Details click: http://caes.mak.ac.ug/uncategorized/over-80-participants-turn-up-for-tr…