Professor Sir Brian Heap скачать в хорошем качестве

Professor Sir Brian Heap

Professor Sir Heap is Director of the B4FA programme and Advisor for the ‘Smart Villages’ project. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy, Former Master of St Edmunds’ College in Cambridge, and Former President of the European Academies Science Advisory Council. The two active projects will be summarised concerned with technology and entrepreneurship in African countries. The first project which started in 2011 - Biosciences for Farming in Africa (www.B4FA.org) is directed towards the implementation of impressive scientific advances in food security where the need is greatest. No single solution will solve this problem but the new genetic technologies of plant breeding developed during the last few years promise to help increase agricultural production and save people from hunger in a sustainable manner. Two scholarly booklets linked to a dedicated website with videos (B4FA.org) synthesize information in a balanced, accessible and affordable form for a wide-ranging audience in Africa. The web site acts as a portal for accurate and accessible information about plant genetics and biosciences, and it is used to circulate a widely-read “Week in Review” African newsletter and a very active social media presence. A Media Fellowship Programme on GM crops and the new genetics of plant breeding attracted 160 journalists and editors in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania. It has proved an overwhelming success, in terms of both outputs and outcomes, generating more than 1000 journalists’ pieces in 2 years and we believe that the activities are well on the way to achieving lasting impacts. Three scoping studies examined how to strengthen the crucial link between the knowledge-base in institutions and smallholder farmers in African countries. They were carried out in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana with the UK National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) Innovation Farm at Cambridge; Kenya and Uganda with the University of Reading; and in Tanzania with Farm Africa. A digital learning course on production and marketing of genetically improved sesame seed was developed and modules in English and Swahili were produced and delivered on tablets to smallholder farmers containing locally developed, hence directly relevant, material. The second project which started in October 2014 - Smart Villages Entrepreneurship - concerns the concept of the ‘smart village’ in which modern energy access acts as a catalyst for development – food security, health, education, productive enterprise, environment and participatory democracy. Energy access can provide a much needed driver for sustainable economic development and growth for a major (circa 2 billion people), but neglected, sector of the world’s economy. The focus on 'off-grid villages' where local solutions are cheaper than national grid extension aims to identify the framework conditions necessary to foster entrepreneurial initiatives to meet the off-grid energy challenge, and which ensure that government and donor funding achieves maximum leverage of private sector investment. Following a preparatory phase to identify relevant research expertise and to make connections with the policy, NGO and major corporate sectors, a ‘Forward Look’ workshop held in Cambridge identified potential game changing technology developments, and a very successful pilot workshop held in Arusha, Tanzania examined the transformative effects of renewable energy in 'off-grid' villages (e4sv.org).