Why Dar pushes for science, technology, innovation

ARUSHA: TANZANIA has reaffirmed its commitment of harnessing Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) to foster global competitiveness for wealth creation.

This comes as the East African nation is determined to enhance national prosperity and a high quality of life for its people.

Opening the fourth Asian and African Stereology Congress at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) on Monday, Professor

Peter Msofe from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology noted that Tanzania was determined to optimise STI, in ensuring that Tanzanians benefit from acquisition and utilisation of available capacities and capabilities.

“In Tanzania that STI plays a crucial role in economic, social and environmental progress, the government, the private sector and other stakeholders are committed to investing in STI to improve the well-being and living standards of its people”, explained

Professor Msofe, while delivering opening remarks on behalf of Professor James Mdoe, the Ministry’s Deputy Permanent Secretary in-charge of science.

Professor Msofe noted that the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology envisions a future with a huge investment in training and development in the next generation of scientists to drive Tanzania’s development through scientific research, technology and innovation.

He further underscored the importance of research saying it was no longer a luxury, but an essential tool for social, economic development in every sector.

“It is indispensable from developed to the less developed ones, so quality research plays a pivotal role in transforming services in the productive sectors through applied action research and discover driven innovation which is considered to be more important that physical resources”, he observed.

Scientists from 10 countries in the world are converging at NM-AIST for the congress, organised by the Ondokuz Mayıs University in Turkey.

The three-day event will see the scientists enhance their knowledge about the fundamental principles of unbiased stereological approaches, interpret the results obtained from cellular counting and volume estimation methods, while also getting knowledge of the experimental and clinical stereological studies.

For his part, Prof Süleyman Kaplan from the Turkish University said the transcontinental country had made significant strides in the advancement of Stereology, particularly through analysing the statistical data to obtain different categories.

He said since 1997 Turkey has been one of the best countries in Europe in advancing Stereology.

Stereology is a quantitative and comparative method that utilises planes, lines and points for the estimation of three-dimensional parameters in morphological studies.

It primarily focuses on geometrical features of objects such as number, density, length, area and volume.

It has also has gained wide application resulting into design-based stereological methods.