It is gratifying to witness the forthcoming 11th graduation ceremony of the Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation comprising Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science Students from African Union Member states. The Institute has made tremendous progress in its efforts to produce quality human resources who are uniquely adapted to provide sustainable solutions to the problems facing our continent. The decision of the African Heads of State to prioritize higher education was informed by the enduring wisdom that any meaningful development programme must be anchored on a sound scientific base.

The month-long celebration will adopt the 2024 AU’s theme of the Year, “Educate an African fit for the 21st Century: Building resilient education systems for increased access to inclusive, lifelong, quality, and relevant learning in Africa”

This training targets students at PAUSTI. It is designed to equip them with the basics of Geographic Information Science and QGIS, with the overall goal of enhancing research in their respective fields. The training will enable them to add spatial dimension to research data to spatially map them. From the maps, any hot-spots may be detected and recommendations made to encourage/discourage growth of the hot-spots. Further, maps reveal spatio-temporal spread/trend of a factor thus enabling forecasting the areas that the factor will affect/fail to affect with time. Depending on the spatio-temporal trend, the factor may be influenced positively/negatively to encourage/discourage the spread. QGIS has been selected as the training software as it is free.