History of the West Africa Built Environment Research (WABER) Conference and Workshop

The history of WABER Conference and Workshop

By Dr Samuel Laryea

WABER is an acronym for West Africa Built Environment Research

In late 2009 whilst I was completing my PhD at the University of Reading, Professor Will Hughes developed a desire to travel to Mali to see a live musical performance by Toumani Diabate. Therefore, on November 9, 2008 Will wrote a Facebook message to me about his ideas and intentions:

“Sammy I was listening to Toumani Diabate [A Malian musician] today. [Will loves music and plays the trumpet in an Orchestra]. What a genius he is. Anyway, he has this Symmetric Orchestra, a wonderful ensemble that almost never tour or leave Mali. But the play every Friday night at Diabate's club, Hogon Club in Bamako, Mali, and it got me thinking - wouldn't it be cool to go to the Hogon Club and see these people? In idle dream, I thought. But then, I thought, why not? Bloody hell, we're only in the world for a limited time, why mope about regretting the inability to do stuff? So, how am I going to get there? A new idea emerged...

Why not arrange some kind of CM Researchers' Workshop for people like Sam [me] who were unable to raise the funds to come to Reading? [I struggled to find the funds needed to help me go to Reading to study for my PhD so Will wanted us to find a way to reach out to other enthusiastic people who might want an opportunity but cannot travel to places like University of Reading, because of lack of funds, in order to move their research forward]. Why not do a doctoral forum in West Africa? We might not get to the Hogon Club, but so what, if we find better stuff? I have no idea of the details, yet, but there are a couple of options. We could attach this to ARCOM, and respond to the ARCOM Committee's desire to be more international. But then again, ARCOM does not want to be just associated with PhD students. We could attach it to CM&E and Reading. Reading University would help to fund it, because the International Office are keen to have people like us go to places and help spread the word about the whole University. I could fund myself from my own resources. Certainly, this is the seed of an idea.

What I have in mind would be a trip to a few places, Ghana, of course, and one or two others, with the possibility of an excursion into Bamako on a Friday. I don't want to make this a long trip. Half a week is what I have in mind. Perhaps five days. We could do a workshop in two places, then see Bamako, then come home. I would want you to come with me, and maybe one or two others, if we could fund them.
What do you think? Is this plausible?

Best

Will”

This 424-word Facebook message summarizes the history of how WABER started. Initially we struggled to find a name for the idea. We simulated several names because we wanted one that could easily be pronounced as one simple word like ‘WABER’. One of the initial ideas was WARS – West Africa Research Seminar. But then we realised that ‘WARS’ would taste based in the mouths of most people because of wars in several parts of Africa. We did not want anything that would generate controversy and spoil the noble aims of our academic ambitions. So we kept thinking about something more appropriate. The breakthrough finally came one evening at Zizzi restaurant in Reading town centre where a group of us (Roine, Will, Milan, Llewellyn, Jan and me) were hosting Professor André Dorée from the University of Twente from Netherlands to dinner. He was visiting us in the University of Reading for a couple of days. Will had a very good meal of pizza with excellently cooked egg so he was in a very happy mood indeed. As he briefed the group about our plans to go to Mali and Ghana, the name WABER finally came up from one of his permutations “West Africa Built Environment Research”. We all liked it and so we decided that the event will be called WABER.

Initially we were not very sure of the response we would get. We did not know whether we would have enough people to justify the aims of what we wanted to do. Never the less, we decided to go ahead with it. I was particularly keen because I knew it would benefit people who might be going through a similar kind of suffering I went through when I was a PhD student in Ghana.

With guidance from Will, I issued a call for abstracts in February 2009 with a submission deadline date of 31 March 2009. Initially the response was very slow. But gradually things started to pick up as a result of several sustained efforts. We got in touch will all of our possible contacts and asked for a list of CM academics in the West Africa region. Then we wrote letters to each one of them personally to solicit their involvement. This is how most West African academics actually got on board. They felt happy about the contact we had made with them and within a short time, most of the academics had started to ask their PhD students to submit abstracts. The momentum for WABER was now forming and we started to get excited about it.

Another point which helped was that Will decided that because this was the first time, and our main help to develop the field of construction management in West Africa, participants should be made to attend the event without having to pay the usual conference registration fee. We had realised that nothing like this had ever taken place in West Africa and so we were determined to create a platform for sharing and disseminating knowledge among West African CM academics and also a networking opportunity for the built environment community in West Africa.

By the time our call for abstracts was over, we had received almost 40 abstracts which was a huge number beyond our expectations because our plan was to have just 30 presentations over a two-day period in June of 2009.

With this, we had to ‘reject’ some of the abstracts especially those that did not fit closely to the panel’s areas of expertise and had a total of 32 researchers included in the final programme. With this, we started looking forward to the journey to Accra.

All along, our plan was to combine this event with a trip to Mali to see the musical performance by Toumani Diabate. However, a series of obstacles finally led to the scrapping of the plan to go to Mali. First, it was getting more and more difficult for us to get flights to Mali. The connections were too burdensome and the schedules were not reliable. There was a risk that if we went ahead with our trip to Mali before trying to catch a flight to Ghana, we might be delayed and not able to arrive on time for our event in Accra. Still, we seemed prepared to take the chance. However, the last straw which ditched our determination to go to Mali was non-commitment from Toumani’s staff. All along, I had been in touch with them and tried to get them to confirm whether Toumani will indeed play in Bamako on the Friday we had in mind which is the 29th of May 2009. But they wouldn’t confirm. Finally, we pushed them to the wall and got the following response:

“Dear Samuel,
Mr Diabate will perform on the 29th unless there is too much rain (there is rainy season!)
Kind regards,
Julia”

With this lack of definite commitment, we scrapped the trip to Mali and naturally Will was disappointed, although very excited about the trip to Accra to meet members of the construction management family in West Africa.

After much work in preparations, our team landed in Accra on the 30th of May for a very successful event on 2-3 June 2009 and the rest, as they say, is history!

We have issued a Call for Papers for WABER 2010 Conference and Workshop for another exciting event and experience in Accra, Ghana in July 26-28.