Dr Abwe Diabe Ephraim
Dr Abwe Diabe and Wife
The Summa Cum Laude( Sango Madiba) Information and Learning Resource Centre in Ekol-Muebah-Nninong has been officially inaugurated by the SDO for KupeMuanenguba. On the sidelines of the inaugural Eco OUTLOOK Bangem reporter Mesumbe Nelly caught up with the initiator of the project, Dr Abwe Diabe Ephraim for an interview.
EXCERPTS;
1)What is the Center all about
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about the Centre. It started as a community Library but soon mutated into a full-fledged Centre for learning and information. This is quite an innovation in this area. My family and I decided to create this learning and capacity building centre( Summa Cum Laude(Sango Madiba) Information and Learning Resource Centre in Ekol-Muebah-Nninong.
It is all about educating the community, promoting innovation, promoting research but even more important promoting community transformation. In a place that has known some form of violence in the past with the Anglophone crisis, with this area being one of the hot spots, it was important to invest in the type of learning and peace building project now that life has returned to normal. With the return of peace we want to encourage our children to begin going back to school, develop a reading culture, participate in all activities and link up with the rest of the world, not just Bangem and Cameroon but globally via the state of the art multi-media unit of the centre.
2) How is the local Community going to benefit from this Center
They are already benefitting. As it stands we are an agriculture community that is why our library here has documents and books sharing best practices in agricultural promotion, marketing strategies, food conservation technics. But the centre is also opened to the rest of the rest of the world. The Centre in collaboration with the University of Buea and divisional delegation of secondary education recently hosted a workshop on Management of school libraries, targeting heads of some 30 secondary schools in KupeMuanenguba. If people from Bangem, Nguti, Tombel gather here for one week as we recently had, it means a lot first to the local economy and for cultural exchanges.
3) Why the Choice of Mueba instead of Bangem the divisional headquarters
I am a communitee volunteer for my community in KupeMuanenguba, Douala, Yaounde and my family, the Ndameton family is invoved in community development activities and youth empowerment in other locations. So its but normal that we also come back home so our people can have first hand information on development related issues.
4) Don’t you think by locating in Muebah the Center may be under-utilized?
I don’t think so. I just mentioned the case of learners coming from the three sub-divisions in KupeMuanenguba, Nguti, Tombel Bangem for a workshop in Mueba. Now we have a holding capacity of 50 places that we can move people all over to Muebah. So learning and researching in a quiet place like this, very close to the beautiful KupeMuanenguba twin lakes can only help produce very excellent results. And this accounts for the name of the place Summa Cum Laude( the best of the best). So in less than two years we already have a visitor rate of over 1500. This tells you the center cannot be said of being under-utilized.
5) Any prospects of adding more equipment in the future, like museum, amusement park for children?
Yes, that is already factored in the three year agenda of the Centre. I was just talking with the traditional head of the Nninong clan who is also encouraging the inclusion of a Museum. If you look at the corner you will see aspects of traditional artifacts already displayed like the talking drum and others. So that is to tell you we have this in our agenda. We have enough space behind the main hall where a Park will be created for amusement and readers can find comfort doing so under trees. So people can work under very natural settings
6) Any advise to the people of Muebah on how best to use the Center?
The entire community of Nninong community have been duly sensitized on the importance of the Centre. In the run up to the creation of this Center enough sensitization was done. I can assure you that the people of Muebah and the Nninong clan are very welcoming to tourists and they are very happy with the coming of the centre.
Thanks for talking to Eco OUTLOOK.
