OU Collaborates with United Nations Representatives to Combat Crisis in Africa

Faculty and staff from the University of Oklahoma recently met with world leaders to address the humanitarian crisis in the Lake Chad region of Africa, where more than 30 million people are facing economic hardship and insecurity.

The University, through OU Outreach, is a member of United Nations Academic Impact, an organization that gives higher education institutions the opportunity to work with the U.N. on issues like global warming, human rights and sustainable development.

Belinda Biscoe, interim senior associate vice president, OU Outreach, facilitated a panel on capacity building that included Kim Klockow-McClain, a research scientist with OU’s Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, and OU professor Yang Hong, director of the hyDROS Laboratory, among others.

As part of its commitment to UNAI principles, OU Outreach, along with the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations, co-hosted “U.N. Systems and Non-State Actors Exploring New Ways of Cooperation,” an international conference held Aug. 5-6 at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Klockow-McClain said she found her work as a behavioral scientist with the weather community easily transferable to the situation in the Lake Chad Basin region.

“Their problems are so deep,” she said. “It will take a long a time for change to come, but what happened at the conference was an exchange of ideas. If it starts the ball rolling in any way, we’ve succeeded beyond any dream.”

Other speakers, panelists and activities focused on meeting the needs of the region according to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals that were developed to erase poverty and provide basic necessities such as clean sanitation, water and education around the world.

Biscoe said opportunities like the Lake Chad conference are one important way the university can connect its research to real-world problems.

“To get a spotlight on the research OU professors are doing in that kind of international forum promotes us as a public university that is focusing its research on a deeper understanding of essential solutions for intractable problems around the globe.”