George Esunge Fominyen
The other day I learnt that the University of Buea had won a multi-million grant on tuberculosis research offered by the NEPAD. That was really good news from Cameroon where you would usually have items on corruption, arrests, and robberies. This success story reminded me of a smaller scale success obtained by that same university four years ago at the the Inter-University Brain Trust Contest (IUBTC). The students representing the University of Buea won in the emerging diseases category after proposing a project on the management of tuberculosis in Fako division.
The Inter-University Brain Trust Contest (Universiades Academique in French) is the intellectual equivalent of the annual university games organised by the Ministry of Higher Education. It seeks to promote the ability of Cameroonian university students to present concrete and marketable solutions to existing problems. I dug down my archive of programmes produced in the days when I was Education News Correspondent (Editor) for the CRTV National Station and re-edited the following piece on the IUBTC (2004) which demonstrates the usefulness of that unsung contest and UB's good performance in TB research. Needless to say the programme Education Switchboard died after I quit CRTV! The position I used to hold was also scrapped. Good listening though.
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