UNESWA partnership saves ESA E2m
MBABANE – ESA will no longer spend E2 million annually to send sugar samples to South Africa for quality testing.
ESA is an acronym for Eswatini Sugar Association.
Banele Nyamane, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the organisation was speaking during the ESA-University of Eswatini Grant Award presentation of E142 885 yesterday to Collen Hlandze, who will be investigating on sweeteners production using sugar cane in 2022/2023.
Hlandze is said to be the third beneficiary after Gcinile Mkoko and Crispin Gomes who received E126 900 and E136 080, respectively. This came after a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that was signed in June 2020.
Nyamane said partnering with the institution had helped as sugar samples testing would be conducted at UNESWA (Kwaluseni Campus) due to the available facility.
Partnered
“To try and develop the local economy, and improve skills, we have partnered with the university in setting up a laboratory. We are confident that very soon, we will reach a stage wherein the lab can undergo independent accreditation,” said Nyamane.
He said ESA’s grant to UNESWA benefitted students under the Master’s programme for the past two years. He said the grant enabled Master’s students to undertake and complete research projects within one academic year by covering their tuition.
He stated that in 2020, Mkoko investigated the production of low sugar carbonated lemon and ginger flavoured beverages from burnt and fresh sugar cane juice.
The CEO stated that Gomes was currently in a process of finishing his research on the production of polylactic acid polymers from sugar cane juice by batch fermentation.
ESA is also awarding a supplementary budget of E23 900 to the outgoing beneficiary Gomes to finish the research.
Nyamane stated that the grants benefitted the sugar industry as much as they did to the students and UNESWA. He said they looked forward to innovative and research outcomes.
UNESWA Vice Chancellor Professor Justice Thwala said the grant of E166 785 would facilitate research into sugar or sugar cane value-added products as part of an ongoing research collaboration between UNESWA’s Eswatini Institute for Research in Traditional Medicine, Medicinal and Indigenous Food Plants (EIRMIP) and ESA.
He said the collaboration between ESA and UNESWA has been ongoing for a long time, but was recently formalised through the MoU signed by the two institutions in June 2020.
“Through this MoU, the parties agreed to collaborate on three main focus areas:
• Facilitate and establish a relationship between the two institutions,
• Promote the provision of services by UNESWA to ESA, through its various departments, including EIRMIP; and
• Facilitate other collaborative initiatives beneficial to both partners.
Thwala further said the event was in line with SADC’s industrialisation strategic roadmap that sought to promote innovation through industry-university partnerships. He said statistics also revealed a sad narrative for African universities in that Africa contributes only two per cent to scientific publications worldwide and the continent was experiencing high youth unemployment, with that of the Kingdom of Eswatini sitting at 48 per cent.
“It is with respect to this observation that the SADC Council of Ministers of Education endorsed His Majesty’s proposal for the establishment of the SADC University of Transformation that will focus on ICT, Industrial Pharmaceuticals, Engineering in order to promote innovation and facilitate job creation through youth entrepreneurship,” he said.
Professor Thwala said he was confident that such collaboration, through the EIRMIP, would grow and produce research of high quality and be of benefit to the economy of the country.
Competing
He stated that EIRMIP was the only research institute within the university that had full-time research staff with no competing lecturing roles and therefore, with relevant funding and support. The university, through EIRMIP, could have a massive research output, which could be of national and economic value.
He further congratulated Hlandze, a student in the Department of Chemistry, who was pursuing his Master of Science in Chemistry. He said Hlandze was selected through a competitive and rigorous process and would conduct his research on sugar cane to produce a value-added product.
Thwala said he is pleased to inform the ESA CEO that the testing laboratories, housed under the Faculty of Science and Engineering, had been established as part of the cooperation between UNESWA and ESA, were now functional.
Hlandze said he started doing his research in 2020 on sweeteners production using sugar cane. He thanked ESA and UNESWA for their collaboration and said without them he would not have received the grant.