IIT Roorkee spearheads MoU between Indian institutions & African Centres of Excellence

NEW DELHI, MARCH 12: IIT Roorkee spearheaded an MoU exchanging ceremony between the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and World bank, as cooperation on strengthening of African Centre of Excellences in western, eastern and southern Africa by way of supporting the capacity building through knowledge transfer for number of students and female students enrolled in ACEs masters and PhD programs.

This shall lead to effective leveraging of the soft prowess of Indian Science and Technology in engagement with Africa Centres of Excellence (ACE’s) established in African countries with the assistance of World Bank to receive target oriented support with the aim for enhancing the post graduate and research education and under take the research in academic institutions. It is expected that quality of postgraduate programs and offered research opportunities to students enrolled in these ACEs shall be enhanced due to research and innovation work proposed to be undertaken between faculty of ACEs and faculty of Indian Academic (seven IITs) and R&D Institutions in priority areas of the ACEs.

Under four thematic priority areas i.e. Material science, Water Management & Infrastructure, Railways & ICT, twelve ACEs across Africa in their focus areas, initially seven IIT’s (Delhi, Roorkee, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras and Hyderabad) two of the DST institutions (JNCASR & ARCI) from India are cooperating on twinning model.

“We are happy that IIT Roorkee has been given the responsibility for coordinating collaboration of Indian institutions with African Centres of Excellence. It shall help strengthen Indo-African ties by addressing the common development related challenges in both India and Africa. IIT Roorkee will build on its legacy of providing capacity building programs to African countries over the last 6 decades,” said Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee.

Each Indian institute and ACE shall hopefully be able to identify the possible topics areas for short-term as well as long-term research, research interests and potential collaborations with the visiting ACE Centers projects.