By Joyce Gyekye
The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and partners, including 15 stakeholders from public institutions, private sector organisations, research institutions, and academia, have launched a Circular Bioeconomy Innovation Hub in Ghana. The hub links the stakeholders to offer their infrastructure and knowledge for building capacity in bio-solutions among students and practitioners in the waste-to-resource recovery sector.
Stakeholders, including Safisana Ghana Limited, the Biotechnology and Nuclear Agriculture Research Institute (BNARI), Water and Sanitation for Urban Population, and Trimark Aquaculture Centre, signed an MOU to scale up decades of research in waste recovery in addressing environmental issues like water pollution, methane emissions, and health problems, as well as business models in the sector.
At an open day event in Accra, the IWMI Africa Director for Research and Impact, Dr. Olufunke Cofie, commended institutions that have contributed to research over the past decades for their work, which has led to the recovery of resources in promoting agriculture, contributing to the energy needs of the country, and addressing environmental issues while creating employment. She said the Hub is not starting from scratch, “as we’ve built it on years of knowledge generation from understanding where the waste comes from, to developing technologies and testing business models”.
Dr. Cofie explained that seven of the 16 organisations involved in the hub will operate as physical centers with real-life waste-to-energy infrastructure that will offer training and demonstrations to entrepreneurs, students, and policymakers. She said the pioneering works of IWMI Ghana and its partners on waste recovery have been replicated in other parts of the world where IWMI operates, based on the successes achieved.
To make the next stage successful, she noted, “would require strong political will, investment, and integrated policy making”.
The Coordinator of the Bioeconomy Hub, Dr. Dzifa Agbefu, said that prior to setting up the hub, IWMI conducted many studies and examined the systemic barriers hindering the circular bioeconomy landscape after the huge investments. This, she acknowledged, was done with the support of multiple stakeholders “so that whatever is coming out of the hub is accepted by all stakeholders”. Dr. Agbefu said the Circular Economy Innovation Hub will be solution-driven, since a lot of inputs have been made into it to deliver the expected outcomes.
During a panel discussion, the General Manager of Safisana Ghana Limited, Elikplim Asilevi, said that though the contributions of the circular bioeconomy are acknowledged in terms of social benefits like job creation and addressing environmental and health issues, it takes a long time for companies in that space to break even. He stated, “Globally, the contribution of the circular economy to the global economy is declining, as the sector contributes to less than two percent of global GDP.”
On the energy sector, Mr. Asilevi said Safisana contributes one thousand megawatts of energy to the national grid and has the capacity to produce more, but structural challenges are hindering that. He entreated companies in the circular bioeconomy space to leverage the carbon credit market, as contained in Article Six of the Paris Agreement, to generate revenue for the environmental benefits they provide.
