This initiative will educate and foster logical thinking for social justice, the central concept of democracy, among future policy makers with the combined use of qualitative and quantitative analyses for decision-making. This initiative framework will also enact the bottom-up participatory democracy and global collaboration through the Internet. It will then ultimately contribute to sustainability and mitigation of climate change and will help resolve international conflict issues by transforming adversaries to collaborators for confrontation-prone problems.

We submitted our grant application ($1 million for 3 years) to the 2017 Powering the Future We Want Program of the United Nations/Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) in June 2017. As soon as we have secured this funding, we will conduct a planning workshop at (1) Columbia University, (2) Stevens Institute of Technology and (3) the United Nations Headquarters in New York City area to organize this initiative on a global scale. Subsequently, we will send a mission team to participating ECOWAS countries for fact-finding on e-learning and e-healthcare possibilities. On this occasion, our colleagues will hold their planning workshop and will have a seminar on system dynamics methodology by an expert from the Millennium Institute in Washington, DC. They will assign task-team members for each of Sustainable Development Goals who will construct their simulation model of those sectors. We plan the following activities for each of the ECOWAS countries; starting with Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, Sierra Leon, etc. (1) Facts-finding trip by a mission team with experts from the USA, (2) Planning workshops in the US and participating ECOWAS countries, (3) Training seminar on systems dynamics simulation modeling, (4) Planning on global e-learning and e-healthcare, (5) Guidance to obtain Japanese ODA funding, etc. During the project phase, we will conduct the following for ECOWAS colleagues close collaboration and assistance on their model construction, report writing, etc. (a) Global Lecture Hall (GLH) among participating parties every 2 months, (b) Intensive use of Google/Discussion System. Columbia University uses qualitative (role-playing) normative gaming in international political science. We will produce one educational simulation system package by combining the qualitative role-playing negotiation with a quantitative (model-based) simulation. This combined use will be a significant paradigm shift in the international political science field with the fusion of humanity and science education. We will transplant this procedure to the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, and University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, as well as other ECOWAS countries. Then we will conduct the inter-linkages of models among ECOWAS countries as forming Electronic ECOWAS and later among Nile River basin countries, thus forming the "Electronic African Union", which eventually will be enlarged to the Electronic United Nations.

The overall goal is to transfer knowledge, innovation, and edge-cutting technology from the developed world to remote and poor countries where the lack of knowledge is inhibiting economic development and perpetuating rampant poverty, tenuous economic growth, and even poor access to basic healthcare services. The learning and mastery of innovative technologies will endow the countries, researchers as well as the farmers, industrialists, and traders with the insight needed to thrive in a more competitive economy. Production will increase, income will rise, and poverty will decline if not be eradicated. A higher income means better access to education, more opportunities for decent jobs, and an improved access to healthcare benefits for all. In spite of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions causing climate change, global cooperation has not yet produced tangible results. We need a significant transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources. Major reasons for slow progress in reducing GHG emissions and increasing use of renewable resources for power generation and transport are the lack of leadership and the framework based on the universally shared rational decision-making skills needed among national and global policy-makers. Without these skills, the policies to cope with climate change are likely to be inconsistent, conflicting, and uncooperative. Creating the leadership and the framework that promote rational decision-making is urgent and indispensable. This initiative will develop the appropriate leadership among current and future policy-makers and the required framework for their collaboration. However, most nations need to significantly improve their pledges (which were submitted at the 2015 IPCC in Paris), and this will require rigorous simulation studies (*), to meet their SDGs. This needs transparent global cooperation with collective and shared responsibilities in a democratic fashion. The ultimate education goal is How to prepare for the emergence of society with no greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the end of this century. (*) With use of integrated SDG <http://www.isdgs.org/ - !documentation/kri3x> Each country final report will become the basis of funding request to the Japan ODA fund. On August 28, 2016 Mr. Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, at the TICAD VI in Nairobi Kenya, pledged US $30 billion, which includes funding for the capacity building of 10 million Africans. References <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/africa/ticad/>. <http://www.mofa.go.jp/files/000006375.pdf>

We initiated globalization of Internet, deregulated telecom policies for the use of text, audio and video, contributed to the digital signal processing through the Internet in early 1970s, and also initiated broadband Internet with optical fiber in 1980s, thus enabled billion people to use Internet and cell phones around the world. Dr. Thomas Mensah and Prof. Victor Lawrence (both Ghanaian) are inducted to the Hall of Fame of the National Academy of Inventors the former for invention of fast extrusion of optical fiber and the latter for contribution of digital signal transmission through Internet. We pioneered the use of the Global Lecture Hall (GLH) videoconference with hybrid technology of satellite and Internet, spanning the globe by connecting many universities from Melbourne to Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s. The GLH events initiated global e-learning and e-healthcare movements. We helped initiate GLORIAD broadband Internet connecting several hundred higher education and advanced research institutions in northern hemisphere ($300 million). We then interconnected GLORIAD with ACE optical submarine cable around the west coast of Africa ($700 million) enabling Africans to access all the linked institutions. We are the worlds-longest running list service provider according to the World Bank. We now have Google list serving more than 5,000 members. With funding from the World Bank, we created the Global University System (GUS) at the University of Tampere, Finland in the summer of 1999. This is now a part of the UNESCO/UNITWIN/Networking Chair Program. Prof. Tapio Varis, who was the Rector of the UN University of Peace in Costa Rica, administers the GUS Chair. We assign a major education and healthcare institution in each country as a hub of the GUS consortium of their country. We empower higher education institutions as key drivers for coordinating and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The institutions will construct system dynamics simulation models of each sector of the SDGs by the experts of those sectors. The models will then be interconnected to form a comprehensive socio-economic-energy-environmental simulation model of their country. We will use the system dynamics solver of the Center for Understanding Change (C4UC) and/or NASAs open sourcetechnology Distributed Observer Network (DON) which was developed to support Space exploration as appropriate to collaborative communication among ECOWAS members participating in NASAs Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) in international inter-university collaboration for its mission to champion and create collegiate-level modeling and simulation education.

University of Tampere (Finland), Stevens Institute of Technology (USA), Columbia University (USA), Millennium Institute (USA), Energy Mentors International LLC (USA), GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A. (GLOSAS/USA), Mayo Clinic (USA), Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) & Center for Life Cycle Design at National Center for Simulation of National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) (USA) University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Walter Ollor Foundation (Nigeria), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)