Patience Makwele
The National Commission on Research, Science and Technology (NCRST) is set to inject a further N$2.5 million into research projects in the Zambezi region this financial year as plans advance for a National Science, Technology and Innovation Park at Liselo.
The funding will target the expansion of previously supported projects, particularly those focused on food security, while the proposed park is intended to give researchers, students and local innovators access to facilities needed to turn ideas into practical solutions.
The Mafwe Traditional Authority has allocated land at Liselo for the planned facility.
NCRST chief executive officer Anicia Peters said the commission wanted to move research beyond academic papers and towards products and technologies that could be tested and used by communities.
“Because we can’t just have students with their master’s degrees and their PhDs and fancy papers in articles and journals that we hardly even read. We want to see tangible outputs,” Peters said.
She said the additional funding would be used to scale up projects that had previously received support from NCRST, with food security among the priority areas.
NCRST has funded five research grants in the Zambezi region since 2014, with the projects receiving a combined N$3.2 million, according to Peters.
The proposed science park is expected to provide another layer of support for this work by bringing research, testing and innovation closer to the communities and industries that could use the resulting products.
NCRST board chairperson Jacob Nyambe said the facility would be designed as a community-facing hub rather than an institution focused solely on academic research.
Among its proposed areas of work are science education and teacher support, agricultural research suited to flood-recession and rain-fed farming, and assistance to innovators who have ideas but lack laboratories, workshops or access to markets.
That focus could prove particularly relevant in the Zambezi Region, where seasonal flooding regularly disrupts communities and agricultural activities.
Regional governor Dorothy Kabula said she hopes the research park would contribute to finding practical ways of dealing with the region’s water challenges, including the harvesting of floodwater that can otherwise become a source of disaster.
The park also comes as the government seeks to strengthen the link between research and economic activity.
Education, innovation, youth, sports, arts and culture minister Sanet Steenkamp said the region already possessed three important resources for developing agricultural technology and the bioeconomy: water, land and a young population.
“The region has a comparative advantage of water, land and a young population, the precise inputs that agricultural technology, food processing and the bioeconomy require,” Steenkamp said in remarks delivered on her behalf.
She said what was lacking was the technical infrastructure to take an idea through testing, certification and development until it became a product that could be brought to market.
For local innovators, the proposed park could therefore address one of the practical barriers between having an idea and being able to develop it into a viable product.
However, the project is still at the development stage, with the land allocation marking an initial step towards establishing the facility.
The Mafwe Traditional Authority has urged the stakeholders involved to move quickly with construction and avoid delays that could stall the development of the park.
The project’s success depends not only on the construction of the facility but also on whether researchers and innovators can access the equipment, funding and technical support required to produce solutions for the region.
