UNESCO SGGC Interview

The story

What the work had to do

An interview recorded for World Engineering Day 2022 with the UNESCO Ghana Commission. Ghana was one of the countries that sponsored the declaration of the World Day for Engineering for Sustainable Development. The interview sets out why that mattered: engineers sit inside the sustainable development goals, in health, basic needs, and transport. The theme that year was Build Back Wiser: Engineering the Future. The conversation was filmed as the world was coming out of COVID-19. The point made on camera is that rebuilding should include disaster-risk reduction and new technology, not only the repair of hospitals and other infrastructure that the pandemic exposed. The interview also marks a UNESCO category 2 centre of excellence for engineering at the Technology Consultancy Centre, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. It describes the centre as a bridge between the university and industry, so that engineering work reaches the country and, beyond Ghana, the rest of Africa. It closes on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. The speaker asks young women to take up engineering, including fields such as hydrogeology and geomatic engineering, and to apply new technology to basic engineering.