In line with the sustainable development goals, four student-innovators from the University of Mines and Technology, UMaT, are expected to receive support to commercialize their business ideas as part of a students’ innovative competition.

Vice Chancellor of UMaT, Professor Richard Kwasi Amankwah, said this to Citi News in Tarkwa when UMaT launched its career and innovation fair that includes innovation competition.

Professor Amankwah explained that the career and innovation fair is part of activities marking UMaT’s 70th anniversary to ensure students exhibit their innovative skills into commercial ventures.

“As part of our 70th-anniversary engagement, this week, we have the career and innovation fair where we want people to think smart and be innovative. The idea is also to let people know what has been going on in UMaT. We are doing so many things around here which include people researching into mercury to clean our polluted land and rivers, waste management, production of activated carbon, conversion of waste plastics to fuel, and mercury-free processes for the small scale gold mining among other things.”

“Some of them are things we are trying to add new concepts to and others are totally new knowledge for the betterment of society… So all these are things we are trying to do to ensure that UMaT takes center stage in our area of specialization. Student-innovators are making presentations and based on the skills and innovations associated with their presentations, we are going to shortlist some of them for final presentations. We are hoping that at the end of the programme, we can get three or four very good innovations with scale-up options so that we can incubate them in our business Incubation Hub for commercial ventures“, he said.

The Vice Chancellor however highlighted other things UMaT is doing to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

“As far as the sustainable development goals are concerned, based on our mandate, we have settled on about nine of the SDGs, and we believe that if we make inroads in reducing poverty through small-scale mining, we increase access to education, especially for females. UMaT started with 0.2% of female education in the mid-90s, but we are 25% now, and we envisage that we shall get to 40% in the near future,“ he added.