In education around the week, a three-day East African Community (EAC)-United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) workshop is underway at the EAC headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania. The workshop has drawn 35 participants from community radio stations in the five EAC Partner States namely Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Speaking during the official opening of the workshop, Ms. Zulmira Rodrigues, the Head of Office and Representative of UNESCO in the United Republic of Tanzania, pledged UNESCO’s continuous support towards community media initiatives in the EAC region. Rodrigues said UNESCO-supported community radios continued to be the main source of information for rural, marginalised and indigenous communities on issues that widely range from economic and socio-cultural policy to addressing emergency situations. Meanwhile, the Inter-university Council for East Africa (IUCEA), the East African Business Council (EABC) and the East African Development Bank (EADB) are jointly organizing the Academia Public-Private Partnership Forum and Exhibition 2015, which will be held in Entebbe, Uganda next month. The forum will run from October 22 to 23 under the theme ‘Develop the Ideal Graduate through Academia Public Private Partnership.’ Prof. Mayunga H.H.Nkunya, the executive secretary of the IUCEA, said the forum will focus on the role of higher education institutions, employers, the private sector and governments in providing the best possible opportunities to students to enable them to develop entrepreneur skills, creativity, and attitude to become appropriate graduates for the labor market. In 2011, the IUCEA, EABC and EADB entered into a partnership which aimed at connecting knowledge and human resources produced by higher learning education institutions in the region. The partnership is focused on enhancing linkages between the private sector and higher education institutions through engagement with the public sector and promotion of the use of higher education research by businesses, among others. The first forum and exhibition was held in Arusha in 2012, where it was decided that they be turned into annual events on rational basis in the EAC Partners States. For that reason, the 2013 forum and exhibition were held in Nairobi and in Kigali in 2014. Elsewhere around the world, this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to a Japanese and a Canadian scientist for their work on tiny puzzling subatomic particles known as neutrinos. Neutrinos are the second most bountiful particles after photons, the particles of light, with trillions of them streaming through our bodies every second, but their true nature has been poorly understood. Takaaki Kajita did early work on the tiny particles at a purpose built underground laboratory a kilometer beneath a mountain in central Japan. Canadian Arthur McDonald was also awarded the prize. His work at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory demonstrated that neutrinos from the Sun don’t disappear on their way to Earth, instead change form. Their work combined overturned the prevailing theory that neutrinos have no mass, and has forced physicists to reconsider the fundamental make-up of the universe. “This is a really big discovery,” says Barbro Asman of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Asman says it could help explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, a riddle that has eluded scientists for years. The scientists will share the $960,000 prize. Compiled by Solomon Asaba
