NEWS RELEASE
KIST WINS INTERNATIONAL AWARD AGAIN
Second Prize
winners from
Nigeria, Bangladesh and Philippines have been awarded £30,000 of prize money.
Winners were personally
congratulated by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales at a separate
ceremony. The
Prince of Wales was impressed by the work of these remarkable people who are
all making a significant contribution to alleviating poverty and helping
protect the environment. The Prince of Wales hopes other will be inspired by
their example.
The international winners of the prestigious
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy 2005 were announced on Thursday, 30th
June 2005 at the Ashden annual awards ceremony in London.
Kigali
Institute of Science, Technology and Management (KIST), Rwanda, has won the
Special Africa Award (£30,000) for underlining the vital role which small-scale
sustainable energy can play in tackling both climate change and poverty in
Africa. KIST was the only institution from Africa to win the First Ashden
Prize. This is also the second time KIST wins such an international award.
KIST
had applied through its Centre for Innovations and Technology Transfer (CITT)
for the competitive Ashden award on the ‘Management of Toilet Wastes Through
Anaerobic Technology’, based on the outstanding achievements made at three
prisons: Cyangugu, Kigoma and Nyagatare; as well as based on the applied research
lines that are being pursued at the Institute with the aim to attain higher
rates in the biodegradation and purification processes of organic wastewater.
In February 2001, KIST forwarded a project on its improved
bread oven for the international Ashden Award competition on renewable energy
technologies, and won for the first time, the first place of the Ashden
Awards.
As Prime Minister
Tony Blair set the stage for G8 focus on climate change, innovative projects
from around the globe tonight received recognition for their work to combat
climate change and poverty at the 2005 Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy.
The Awards, hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby, took place at the
Royal Geographical Society, London with guest speakers RK Pachauri, chair of
the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Secretary of State
for International Development, Hilary Benn MP.
The Secretary of State for International
Development, Hilary Benn, MP,
who presented the prizes, commented: "Tackling
world poverty and climate change together are the great moral and practical
challenges of our age. I commend the Ashden Awards for showing how people from
all four corners of the planet are working with imagination and passion to meet
those challenges. The winners here tonight who are real 'doers' who have come
up with solutions to change lives for the better - a great achievement of which
they should be justly proud."
In addition, two four awards were made to
projects in the UK, in recognition of the central role which industrialised
nations such as Britain must play in tackling climate change
The
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy were created in 2001 by the Ashden Trust,
one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, and were established as an
independent charitable trust in 2004.
The
2005 Awards were
funded by the 10 Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, together with Climate
Care, the John Ellerman Foundation and the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust.
The Awards are decided by an
expert panel of judges which comprises academics, practitioners, journalists
and NGO specialists, all highly experienced in the field of sustainable energy
and development.
This is testimony that KIST community outreach programmes
are now receiving international acclaim. This can be illustrated as given
below:
The Rt. Hon. Hilary Benn, UK Secretary of State for
International Development during his lecture ‘Building Science &
Technology Capacity with African Partners’ on Monday, January 31st,
2005, in London said that an organization like KIST – the Kigali Institute
of Science and Technology, in Rwanda – is a superb example of building African
scientific capacity.
The Report of the Commission for Africa, March 2005, reads, ‘There is some scientific capacity
in Africa. The African Economics Research Consortium (sub – Saharan Africa),
the Biosciences Facility for Central and Eastern Africa (hosted in Kenya), CIDA
City Campus (South Africa), the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology
(Rwanda), and the University Sciences, Humanities and Engineering Partnership
(Central and East Africa) are some examples of excellent centres, institutes, universities
and partnerships that there are.’
The Use of Science in UK International Development Policy,
Thirteenth Report of Session 2003 – 04, Volume 1, on examples of the
contribution made by science and technology to development reads, ‘Bio gas
Digesters: The Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management in Rwanda
has been at the forefront of developing and propagating biogas technology.’