UEW Academics Win €90,000.00 Research Grants

Three professors from the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) have been awarded research funding from the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) totaling one million Swedish Kronor (about €90,000.00) to work on two distinct projects.    

The trio, Prof. Enoch F. Sam, Mr. Prince Kwame Odame, and Prof. Samuel Hayford, are working on "Removing barriers to a disability-inclusive urban transport system (policies and regulations) in Accra and Nairobi (SITUATE-2)" and "Walking as a mode of transportation in the "unwalkable" Context: Cross-city Experiences from Ghana and Nigeria (Project GIANT)".

The first project aims to build on the previous findings of the project SITUATE (challenges and policy-practice lapses) to unearth implementation barriers and challenges through a stakeholder-led approach for attention and redress.  An aspect of the study will involve action research, in which team members will facilitate interactions between people with disabilities (PWDs), decision-makers, implementers, and planners to kick-start the process of identifying some concrete solutions.  

The action research approach will be accompanied by narrative and discursive methods to stimulate experiential and social learning to combine research enquiry and planned action. The project is one of the eight projects selected for funding in this year’s VREF‘s Mobility and Access in Africa Cities (MAC) programme. The MAC programme seeks to engage professionals, policymakers, and civil society actors who are committed to achieving goals of sustainable and equitable urban mobility access.

The second project seeks to contribute to the limited research on everyday walking experiences and practices in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from the cities of Cape Coast in Ghana and Owerri in Nigeria. It aims to explore the cities’ residents’ everyday walkability practices, habits, preferences, and the strategies adopted to navigate the risks they face in their quest to leverage walking to get around.

The study's goal is to discover some cross-city insights that can be usefully embedded in local and national policy to provide equal access to environmentally and socially sustainable modes of transportation in SSA cities.

The entire team for the two research projects consists of Prof. Enoch F Sam (Project lead/Principal Investigator), Mr. Prince Kwame Odame and Prof. Samuel Hayford (all of UEW); Dr. Michael Munene and Dr. Elizabeth Kanini Wumuchiri of the University of Nairobi (UoN) in Kenya; Dr. Chinebuli Uzondu and Dr. Chris Ikeogu of the Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO) in Nigeria; and Dr. Godwin Boateng and Dr. Emmanuel Mogaji, external collaborators to the Ghana and Nigeria team respectively.