Landmanagement in Nigeria!

After a first contact back in 2021, the chair of Landmanagement is now supporting the WASCAL’s (West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use) Doctoral research program “Climate Change & Human Habitat” at the Federal University of Technology (FUT) in Minna, Nigeria. On October 1st, two staff members of the chair (Audrey Bourgoin and Christian Hickel) travelled to Minna to teach two one-week modules “Advanced Geoinformation Systems” and “Settlement Dynamics and Modelling” on the use of geoinformation systems and geodatabases to 12 west African PhD students as part of their doctoral training. The second week includes a day workshop (hybrid) where several experts as well as the PhD Students from the WASCAL CC & HH program will talk about their experiences and present some results of their research.

The local staff takes good care of our colleagues: they introduced them to the local cuisine (motto: “no pepper please”, request unfortunately seldom totally fulfilled, to the chagrin of their burned taste buds), pick them up each morning from their hotel, and showed them around the city of Minna during the weekend: the main survey point of Nigeria (located in Minna!), the “old” and the “new” campuses (unfortunately mostly devoid of life, as the universities in Nigeria are at that point striking since 8 months, demanding better financing of the higher education system), the local zoo…

Thank you for the very warm welcome and we hope to meet again!