GAAS Event Info

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23 Oct: GAAS Public Forum 2022 – The African Continental Free Trade Area; Challenges and Prospects

The African Continental Free Trade Area is an ambitious trade pact to form the world’s largest free trade area by connecting almost 1.3bn people across 54 African countries. To deepen Africa’s economic integration, the accord intends to create a single market for products and services. The trade area’s aggregate gross domestic product might be over $3.4 trillion but reaching its full potential will necessitate considerable policy reforms and trade facilitation measures across African signatory countries.

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09 Jun: GAAS Public Forum 2024 – National Elections In Ghana: Issues And Prospects

As Ghana approaches its upcoming elections on December 7, 2024, understanding the evolving political landscape and the pressing issues that will shape the nation’s future is more crucial than ever. The insights gathered from the 3- day Ghana Academy of Arts and Science (GAAS) Public Forum, held from June 24 to 26, 2024, are particularly important during this pivotal time. The forum served as a vital platform for dialogue among experts across various sectors of national development.

This year’s event which focused on the theme, “National Elections in Ghana: Issues and Prospects”, featured six distinguished speakers who contributed their insights on various aspects of the electoral landscape. Their presentations addressed key challenges and opportunities that could influence the outcomes of the upcoming elections.

24 May: Inaugural Lecture – Contribution of African Popular Music Studies to Universities -Prof. John Collins FGA

This presentation concerns the importance of African popular music studies for Ghanaian University departments. It begins with the difficulties in getting this topic accepted into Academia despite the fact that Kwame Nkrumah fully endorsed the popular performance sector, as well as traditional music and African art-music as part of Ghana’s national culture development plan. Because of his overthrow in 1966 his well-rounded tripartite approach to national culture (i.e., traditional, art and popular music) was not fully transmitted into the university curriculum which for many years did not include any classes on African popular music, including even on Ghana’s homegrown highlife. Indeed, the first African popular music courses were only introduced to the University Music Department students in the late 1990s, beginning first at Legon by myself and Professor Willie Anku. So this presentation begins with the benefits these new courses brought to the Music Department and School of Performing Arts: namely training students to play highlife, providing pedagogic teaching materials from the scores of local popular music, supplying knowledge and skills to help students find jobs in the booming popular entertainments and creative industries sector, being a course attractive to foreign students, and establishing Music Department bands that showcase highlife and other forms of African popular music. The presentation then turns to six non-performance university departments that benefit from African popular music studies