From my seat as an Education economist at the World Bank, I go through a number of strategies from countries and sectors in Africa outlining how best to achieve economic growth and development. I am repeatedly struck by a key question: Who will do it? Who will add value to African exports? Who will build? Who will invent? Who will cure? The answer is, of course, that graduates from African universities and training institutions should do it. But the problem is one of numbers and quality—there are simply not enough graduates in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and programs are of uneven quality.
Let’s take three examples:
In the extractives sector, who can form local supplier companies and add value through processing to the minerals, oil and gas? It has to be creative entrepreneurial, highly-trained African engineers. A 2011 study from the Making the Most of Commodities Programme (MMCP) shows that lack of sufficient skills is the key constraint to expanding the role of local suppliers in Africa’s extractive industries. We need to train more high quality engineers with relevant entrepreneurial skills.
Ebola is another example of how well-trained health and science professionals, availability of high level diagnosis labs, and well-functioning systems within some countries have contributed to quickly containing the epidemic in those countries. In Nigeria, for example, at the Center of Excellence at Redeemers University in Ogun state, researchers were able to confirm the first case of Ebola in Nigeria within 6 hours, thereby allowing a crucial rapid containment of the virus in the country.
Health has been a key focus in the World Bank’s development support to Sub Saharan Africa for the past 15 years, and perhaps this is the only sector, where there has been great progress in training doctors, nurses, researchers and others. But evidently, more skilled health workers, including doctors and medical researchers, are required for Africa to diagnose, contain and cure.
Africa’s power sector is expected to receive billions of dollars in investments over the coming years. But who will build and maintain the generation plants and distribution networks? African engineers and scientists have to be trained now and trained in areas specific to Africa’s development.
The critical first step is to improve training capacity through the creation of thousands of high caliber faculty. Next, governments and their international partners must increase funding to research and research-based education at the Master’s and Doctoral levels, with a strong focus on STEM. We must ensure that girls are receiving more STEM degrees and excelling in the focus areas. Finally, we must build more partnerships and knowledge-sharing initiatives to drive the STEM agenda.
A report from The World Bank Group and Elsevier, “A Decade of Development of in Sub-Saharan Africa: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Research,” to be launched on September 30th, sheds light on the quality and capacity of Africa’s current higher education system. The report examines research indicators over a decade from 2003 to 2012 for three different sub-regions in Sub Saharan Africa and outlines how research is a key indicator of a country’s ability to produce a high-quality, world-class science, technology, engineering and math workforce.
Clearly, Africa is rising. The continent’s share of global research increased from 0.44% to 0.72% between 2003 and 2012. However, Africa still accounts for less than 1% of the world’s research output, which remains a far cry from its share of the global population at 12%. We need to make bold investments in building capacity in Africa to apply and adapt knowledge to problems on the continent. Otherwise, there will be fewer locally-recruited jobs and not enough value addition in Africa.
Join us for a live discussion on STEM research in Africa:
A Decade of Development:
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Research in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
10:30 a.m. to 12 noon ET
http://live.worldbank.org/stem-research-sub-saharan-africa
Follow on Twitter: #Science4Dev | #wblive
Interesting point of view.
African youth need to achieve high level of education. Not in any kind of discipline, but in sciences, engeneering, TVET, ect. Only those things can bring prosperity. We have to change the trend. Most of graduated from High education are in discipline that are not quite relevant for Africa development. Because africa does not need it or its development is not at the level to enable using them. More attention is need for STEM. Effort toward sciences must be maintained. Good blog-article and thank for the author.
Thank you for such perceptive observations about professional education institutions as essential investments in countries that want to have sustainable development.
I believe that Africa can atrract more foreign investments which will be a key to improve other sectors for example employment opportunities and safety and security because if you look at South Africa, some companies pull out reason being that there is a lot of crime and this creates a decrease in the workplace leaving those employees jobless.Now we look at on how we can improve this situation together with the government intervention
There are some organizations such as ours that has seen the need and have started doing something about it in rural areas through empowering small scale farmers by introducing integrating zero-waste mechanized conservation agriculture, where the agricultural biomass is used as feedstock for producing such useful items as composting, biofuel, organic fertilizers, biochar and substrate for mushroom production. The goal is while making it possiblr for the farmers to increase yields and transforming the o=produce, we also introduce their children to fundermentals of better education by stressing on the teaching of science, mathematics and technology at early ages in that almost all the programs entail. The children learn these at early ages and as they grow these technologies are manifested in middle level technician training with sight on jobs in the rural environment.
Good article,clearly states about urgency & need for skill development in STEM.
In my opinion,answer to your question many WHO's, I think every human on earth shud be responsible for Africa development.,having said that Africa should communicate international market that its not Red tape any more ,its Red Carpet now!.
Yes I believe that African youth are the ones that will help end poverty in Africa. However for that to be possible the government has to improve the education systems. The government has to create incentives to prevent the youth from leaving Africa in pursuit of greener pastures.
Very stimulating, but provocative. Current governance of the education sector in many African countries is undermining the STEM agenda in many respects. There is need for a broad stakeholder engagement on this issue for it to gain traction in many countres. Please give examples of where the STEM agenda is being actively pursued.