REMARKS BY PROFESSOR MURUNGARU KIMANI, DIRECTOR, PSRI DURING THE OFFICAL OPENING OF THE CARTA UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI COMMITTEE MEMBERS RETREAT ON FRIDAY MAY 29TH 2015

AT THE MAASAI LODGE, RONGAI

Deputy-Director BPS, Professor Seth McLigeyo, Representing DVC (RPE), Professor, Lucy Irungu,

Director School of Public Health, Dr. Dismas Ongore, the CARTA Co-Focal Person, UoN

Mr. Yebei Representing Professor Ngure, the CARTA Programme Manager

CARTA Committee Members, UON,

UON CARTA Fellows

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the Population Studies and Research Institute (PSRI) and my own behalf, I take this opportunity to thank our Chief Guest DVC (RPE), Prof. Irungu represented by Deputy-Director BPS Professor Seth McLigeyo for accepting to officiate at the opening ceremony of this retreat. I also similarly thank you members for taking time out of your normal and demanding duties of the University to participate in the retreat. The representative of our chief guest this retreat is for the CARTA family, those who have been involved in the CARTA activities in one way or another or supposed to have been involved: CARTA Committee members, administrators who have received CARTA training and CARTA Fellows. So feel most welcome.

The idea of having the retreat arose from the challenges that we have faced of having the meeting of the Committee within the university. Thus I am pleased by what I can say is a fairly good representation of those whom we had invited. Thank you again for coming.

The CARTA committee of UON is a committee of the UON and members are appointed by the Vice-chancellor in line with the MoU between CARTA and UoN. The Committee is charged with the responsibility of spearheading the activities of the Consortium within our university and is thus an important component in the CARTA organizational structure.

CARTA was established in 2009 to strengthen PhD training in nine African Universities and UON is one of them, indeed a founder member of the Consortium. Because of the poor attendance to meetings in the past we have not effectively discharged our roles towards this goal. I hope that after this retreat we will be more effective. Indeed one of the pending activities which has been delayed is the selection of the participants to the Sixth Faculty and Staff workshop which UoN will be hosting in July 2015. These workshops bring together academic, administration, library and ICT staff in order to strengthen the management of research grants in the partnering universities and I am sure we will be told more about this in subsequent sessions. There are other key activities that UoN staff and students can benefit from: supervisors workshops and publicizing of the fellowships to our students.

The representative of our Chief guest I would like to note that CARTA has evolved an innovative PhD training model which can be domesticated in our PhD programmes. I hope that the UON CARTA committee will have a opportunity to deliberate on this sometime.

In conclusion I would like on behalf of PSRI which has been coordinating the CARTA activities at UoN thank CARTA for their support. The Institute looks forward to the continuation of the collaboration between the two Institutions. With those few remarks it is my pleasure to welcome Professor Seth Mcligeyo to give the opening remarks and to officially open the retreat.

Welcome Professor McLigeyo!

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