ACE-FUELS has engaged a consortium of in-country, regional, and international expert researchers, scholars and academic partners to achieve the Centre’s educational, training and research agenda. The Centre’s focus areas shall be investigated in a collaborative manner to find informed and sustainable solutions to each identified challenge. These experts are drawn from various institutions:
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ACE-FUELS realizes the importance of academia/industry collaboration for education, training and skills development, for innovation and technology transfer through generation, acquisition, and adoption of knowledge, as well as for promoting entrepreneurship/start-ups/spin-offs. Accordingly, we have been partnering with industry and sectoral stakeholders in design, implementation and evaluation of all Centre activities, right from the conceptualization phase of the ACE-FUELS, to appropriately set up the education, training and research agendas of the Centre, in order to optimally attain our goals of training industry-ready and entrepreneurial postgraduate students. The identified benefits of ACE-FUELS collaboration with industry are wide-reaching, including additional funding for research, graduate training, access to facilities and equipment, the opportunity to relate research with real-world problems faced by industry, research commercialization. Also, asides the student internship positions, ACE-FUELS also create industry adjunctship positions to enable researchers spend some time working in the industry, as well as industry fellow positions to accommodate subject area experts from industry in teaching and research co-supervision.
ACE-FUELS engagement with industry is by research, development and innovation activities, short courses for industry staff, consultancy, product commercialization, technology transfer depends on the type of industry. Stakeholders in the industrial sector fall into two broad categories: (1) the large industries; (2) multinationals and (3) small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This is taken into consideration in designing our models for industry engagement.
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Our goal is to partner with national, regional and international knowledge networks to evolve novel technologies and approaches, which optimally engage local and regional scientific talents, while linking global expertise.
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Green Africa Innovation Network (GAIN, www.greenaib.com), a network of 18 institutions spanning over 13 African countries, established to reinforce scientific cooperation across the continent in the field of renewable energy and sustainable development, to promote human resources development and to encourage economic, scientific, and technical projects of common interest to all its members.
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Pan African Electrochemistry Network,set up in 2016 by scientists from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt and the UK, with the aim of popularizing the applications and benefits of electrochemical science in Africa, especially for energy research and environmental protection, through postgraduate training, research and co-supervision, lecture delivery, joint workshops, advice on curricula and student co-supervision.
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West African Centres of Excellence in Energy Network (WACEENet): A consortium of the World Bank Africa Centres of Excellence and emerging Centres of Excellence, focused on energy and power.
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