The final Symposium: an opportunity to celebrate the Contan network and its results

Students and lecturers from the Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), MWEKA and University of Dar Es Saalam (UDSM), thanks to the CONTAN Project network, could learn during the past 3 years how to identify living organisms close to extinction and use professional equipment that will enable them to measure and preserve samples of precious biodiversity through the project sponsored by the European Union.

To celebrate this opportunity and present results and positive consequences to stakeholders and scientific community, a final Symposium was held an the end of August 2024.

In front of tens of participants , Dr. Charles Kilawe, a Lecturer from Sokoine University of Agriculture and one of the coordinators of the CONTAN project, underlined the importance of being able to identify biospecies that are in danger of extinction and know how to protect them in collaboration with wildlife and forest conservationists all around the world.

Among all tools provided live and online thanks to the contribution of many sceintists and researchers, the onine and downloadable toolkit was one of the relevant results achieved by the committment of the network revolving around Contan project.

Justified by the lack of comprehensive reference material, the toolkit is designed to primarily help students, and in turn their lecturers, to navigate through the e-learning material and support the integration of theoretical and field training, hence augmenting the reach and potential of the modules. The document indeed provides summaries of all lectures along with a selection of tutorials for some of the analytical methods.