‘Involve Users in Research Process to Ease Implementation of Findings

’Bennett Oghifo

Professionals in research institutions have called on governments and those in the private sector to involve the potential end-users of their research findings in the process to ease the implementation.
They also noted that vulnerable people who are mostly impacted by extreme weather conditions were not being captured by statistics and by policy intervention.
These were the views of Professor Andrew Onwuemele, a research Professor at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Factors, and Prof. Grace Olukoyi, a professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Management at Lead City University Ibadan.

They discussed the issues during a Stakeholders’ engagement meeting on a joint research being conducted by the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, Lead City University, Ibadan and the University of Lagos, on Extreme Effects of Heatwaves.
The engagement, according to the organisers, was to intimate the critical stakeholders in the area of environment about the research with a view to intimating them about the effects of heatwaves on urban dwellers, particularly those at the suburbs. The meeting was also to get inputs from the stakeholders so as to make the research holistic and all-inclusive.

According to Onwuemele, “The problem has been the low involvement of stakeholders in the implementation of most of those predictions.

“So, what happened is that the stakeholders, I mean, users of those findings, found it difficult to accept the result because they were not involved.

“So, we as a Research Institute are taking a new approach to research, design and implementation, where stakeholders engaged right from the beginning of the project, to have a kind of co-creation of knowledge where both the researcher and the stakeholders, people in the margin, the vulnerable people are part and parcel of the research process and so, they own the findings and, of course, the issue of adoption or utilisation of the of the findings will become less of a problem because all the key stakeholders are part and parcel of the research process.”

On extreme events, he said, “Are critical issues, because, when we talk about flooding, for instance, when we talk about heat waves, for instance, it generates several health challenges, and when people are sick, it means a lot of resources are required to bring them back to their feet. On the part of the government, when there are issues of flooding, you see a lot of damage in terms of infrastructure. These require an enormous amount of resources for the government to reconstruct those infrastructure.”

According to Olukoyi, “We are looking at a Pan African interdisciplinary lens on the margins to tackle the risk of extreme events. We want to see how those in the sciences, those in the humanities, and people from different disciplines can come together in the academia, private sector, the government, the civil society, the NGOs, and how we can work together to define what extreme events are, what are the risks of it on the margins- people who do not have a voice in policy making- the disabled, women and children, the people with underlying illnesses that are being impacted by extreme means of flooding, and distress and drought, but most of the time they are not being captured by statistics and by policy intervention.”