Figure 1 Co-Chair- Industrial Collaboration, Communication and Documentation of KBDCU conference, Dr Ajantha Perera.
The Knowledge Based Development Conference of Unifiji (KBDCU) scheduled for the 6th of May 2017 is a solution based conference says Technical and Research Officer of the Vice Chancellor’s office at UniFiji, Dr Ajantha Perera, who is also the Co-Chair- Industrial Collaboration, Communication and Documentation of KBDCU.
“It’s a solution based conference in terms of teamwork; the research done by one person can’t solve all the problems so that’s why the research work of everyone is put together in one forum so that people can listen to each other and use the acquired knowledge for development,” she explained.
The KBDCU is a conference where academics as well as the corporate and government sectors could come together to discuss about the development of the country.
“For developing countries like Fiji, it is vital that academics and researchers, who are at the Universities, assist in the development program thus contribute towards development of Fiji as a nation, it needs the knowledge that is available from sciences, arts, music, literature, engineering and technology to come together so that they can prepare an action plan, prepare certain strategies, and how they could contribute to the development of the country,” she explained.
The conference would be divided into two parts where the first half (in the morning) would see discussion between academics from USP, FNU and UniFiji and the second half where the discussion would be expanded to the corporate sector.
“We would be inviting people from the different Universities (UniFiji, USP and FNU) and the corporate sector to come together to discuss about the research that is being done already. First half of the conference, which is the morning session would see a presentation of 40 papers from academic from USP, FNU and UniFiji,” she stated.
“In the afternoon we would be bringing the corporate sector to discuss with the research paper presenters as to how the corporate sector would like to liaise with the academic sector to take the research further and what they could use from the findings for their own development work as well as the development of the country,” she commented.
The University would like to humbly invite corporate sector from all works, NGOs, Government sectors, foreign sectors, academics as well as students to attend the conference.
KBDCU would be hosted at the University of Fiji Saweni campus on May 6, 2017.
