Action Plan
Toward satisfying our four objectives,
participants agreed to undertake three followup activities immediately,
and to explore additional funding possibilities for a minimum of another
two activities.
Immediate followup activities:
- Establishment of "virtual headquarters" for each
society, through a common website with links to individual society pages.
The number one priority on the "wish list" established in
the voting process was the need for a permanent national office, independent
of the particular coordinates of the president at any given time. Having
a permanent presence was seen as a prerequisite for improving visibility
and legitimacy and for attracting new members, i.e., it is a fundamental
precondition for building technical, financial, and managerial capacity.
This web-based strategy is a partial solution in that it provides a
permanent presence that will not change with each new leader. It may
not be as ideal as having a physical headquarters complete with full-time
staff, but it is an extremely cost-effective measure with significant
benefits. A central website with the domain name www.africhem.org
and links to separate pages and permanent email addresses for each African
chemical society will serve as a dependable information repository and
contact mechanism. AAAS is responsible for the initial establishment
of the site, in cooperation with each of the African societies and with
support from IUPAC. Since the website approach does not resolve the
need for fax and postal contacts, it was also suggested that the societies
seek to pool resources with other scientific societies in their respective
countries to share a common PO box and fax machine, possibly under government
auspices. This approach has already worked in Ethiopia.
- Creation of a subscription-based electronic newsletter featuring
news items contributed by all the African chemical societies, to be
coordinated by AAPAC. This plan arose out of a discussion about the
feasibility of establishing a new pan-African online journal of chemistry,
and is intended to serve in part as a first step toward that eventual
goal. The newsletter itself is significant in that it can become an
important source of information on developments in African chemistry,
as well as a vehicle through which the societies can learn from and
foster collaboration with each other. As such, it is an intra-African
value-added initiative that is expected to lead to still more ambitious
future collaborations.
- Establishment of a database of African
chemists and institutional capacities. The need for such a database
is widely recognized, as currently there is no central repository
of information on who is doing what in chemistry in Africa. Some work
toward compiling the database has already been started, by AAPAC as
well as Professor Nkunya in Tanzania, and AAPAC will take the lead
in coordinating these efforts with assistance from IUPAC. The database
will eventually be expanded to include chemical industries in Africa.
This initiative relates to the goals of fostering intra-African as
well as US-African and society-industry collaboration.
Additional activities requiring additional
funding:
- A scientific workshop of US and African chemists in an important
sub-discipline where international collaboration can be particularly
fruitful. The leading candidates discussed at the workshop are the fields
of "green chemistry" and natural products, although other
possibilities have not been excluded. A full-scale followup effort of
this type, based on workshop discussions, was seen as necessary in order
to serve the goal of promoting US-African collaboration effectively.
The African chemical societies and the ACS will take the lead here to
determine the most useful form that such a project should take, but
our discussions pointed to an intensive workshop with the goal of practical
knowledge transfer and genuine scientific collaboration.
- A training workshop for African scientific
societies (chemistry and otherwise) to explore nonprofit management,
membership, marketing, and sustainability issues. A variety of tools
exist to enable this sort of training, and much expertise is available
to foster creative approaches to sustainability and engender good
management practices. Such a workshop would most likely involve specialized
management consultants as well as personnel from appropriate sections
of US scientific societies, e.g., development and membership officers
from AAAS, ACS, and/or other similar institutions.
A private electronic mailing list
has been created for workshop participants to communicate about these
followup activities, continue workshop discussions, and otherwise maintain
momentum towards sustained collaboration. The list will be expanded in
the near term to include representatives of other African chemical societies
that were unable to participate in the workshop itself. In this way, the
products of the workshop can be extended to include the larger community
of African chemists.
