An Assistant Director, Centre of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education, North Carolina Agricultural and Technological State University, Prof. Kosi Delali Edoh, has stressed the need for academic institutions in Ghana to produce graduates in the area of Data Science.

According to him, a lot of universities in the world were trying to establish new programmes in Data Science to produce graduates for companies that require the services of data scientists for their operations. Prof. Edoh said this when he took his turn to present a paper on “Data Science Curriculum Development and Research” as part of the monthly Seminars organised by the School of Physical Sciences. The lecture was aimed at sensitising members of the University Community on the usefulness of Data Science.

Prof. Edoh said that unlike some universities in the West, no African university currently offered a programme in Data Science. Against this background, he noted that he would like to introduce Data Science programme in the University of Cape Coast to train more students to become fully-fledged Data Scientists. “In Africa, we don’t have anything yet, so I thought it may be a good idea to establish the same thing (Data Science) in UCC.,” said Prof Edoh. He said the programme, when introduced hopefully in June 2018, would equip prospective students with both theoretical and practical backgrounds. 

Prof Edoh indicated that there was a huge potential in the African, adding that the power of Data Science could be harnessed to address some social and economic needs on the continent. Moreover, he said companies in Africa, especially Ghana, don’t have the requisite expertise to analyse data in their day-to-day business activities.

Prof Edoh stated that the proposed programme would target graduate students from various academic disciplines so that they could become experts to analyse data in their chosen fields. He expressed gratitude to management of UCC and the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology for their continuous support towards the proposed programme.

It will be recalled that in 2016, the University of Cape Coast was selected by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program(CADFP) to host an African Diaspora scholar from USA to work on a collaborative project on “curriculum development, research and graduate student mentoring and supervision in data science”. Prof. Edoh led the project, together with Mr. Elliot Kojo Attipoe, a lecturer at the Department Computer Science and Information Technology.