In a recent SciDevNet article, Ochieng’ Ogodo reported on the discussion outcomes from this year’s Regional Conference on Balanced and Inclusive Education (BIE) aimed to offer suggestions for addressing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (Education).
The meeting was hosted in Lagos in July 2017 by the Nigerian Academy of Science (NAS) in collaboration with the Switzerland-based NGO Education Relief Foundation.
Kalu Mosto Onuoha, the president of the NAS and professor of geology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, argued: “[Africa] needs to impart innovation and entrepreneurship to students. We don’t have enough hands-on training. [African graduates] may have excellent degrees in theory but they lack the practical, innovation [skills] and ability to think outside the box. That is not inclusivity. […] We need PhD products that can [create] things that get patented. The curriculum must be reworked to include creative thinking in our universities. […] African universities are not doing well in global rankings with the exception of those in South Africa. For instance, in Nigeria there were universities that ranked very high in the past but that is no more, and reasons are so many. What we have today are universities with over three times the population [limit], and most of the equipment is broken down or just not there. […] Science academies are the highest scientific institutions of a given country and using them to influence educators to promote indigenous knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship in training students could aid sustainable development.”
Mahouton Nobert Hounkonnou, president of the Benin National Academy of Science, said, “Most countries in Africa are facing obstacles in education and reforms are required to address societal challenges. African countries are multicultural and multi-ethnic with rich heritage, know-how, and indigenous knowledge in many fields such as medicine. If you combine […] all these aspects to enrich formal education, we will impact our own societies and at the same time we will enrich the world.”
Read the full article at scidev.net/…/science-academies-influence-education-africa.html
Addressing the above mentioned concerns we present here selected ongoing initiatives, collaboration projects and promising approaches.
Get in touch and comment below if you would like to see more of these highlighted here.
At this year’s #ScienceAfrica UnConference attendees brainstormed their big ideas for Africa and also indicated the required skills and expertise. You can read the Key Outcomes Report, which draws together the main themes that emerged from the panels, working groups and workshops.. The Planet Earth Institute team compiled a list of the top 10 ‘Big Ideas for Africa’:
- Recognise and learn from African achievements in science and technology
- Develop children’s understanding of computer science and technology by building small robots and other technological equipment
- Harness crowd finance to fund sustainable development projects
- Store all the water that floods east African cities every rainy season and use it for crop irrigation
- Enhance the ability of teachers to deliver 21st century STEM skills to students, using low-resource sustainable projects
- Build cadres of inspired engineers with the skills to support economic and social development in their countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Provide meaningful vocation education, especially for African young women, particularly child mothers who are often the most disadvantaged
- Deliver a soft skills development programme for young people in particular
- Ensure that grant schemes available to African scientists are widely publicised
- Develop Artificial Intelligence interfaces that can provide health information direct to people’s phones
“TReND in Africa” stands for Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development in Africa and is a non-profit organisation run by volunteer scientists at universities around the world.
Besides organizing a wide range of educational activities, and supporting the establishment of top-level scientific facilities in several African countries by leveraging large scale, low cost approaches to innovation and research TReND in Africa promotes and facilitates volunteer teaching at African Universities. If you get inspired and would also like to spend some time teaching sign up here.
Seeding Labs works with people (like you) across the world to remove barriers to scientific discovery for talented researchers. Their flagship program Instrumental Access enables scientists to unleash their full potential through donations of state of the art science equipment from surplus, overstock, or traded-in items that otherwise would go to waste or be left unused.
Seeding Labs’ African success stories and reports cover institutions in Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), is the first African-based training centre to teach effective communication skills to scientists.
TCCs’ mission is to contribute to the increase in profile, locally, and internationally, of African science, and its impact on the life of Africans, by improving skills in technical communication in all forms, at academia and other relevant forums.
In as much as these innovation are good and should be encouraged, African Governments should be more involved in these kind of projects and be ready to provide the necessary funding and grants for its development. I would say that many of our research done by Africans are either carried out outside Africa or are funded by Europeans which limits the research study availability across Africa.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Ebenezer. We totally agree – despite many efforts by African governments in many countries there is still much more to be done. By highlighting the challenges together with approaches to solutions by African actors in collaboration with non-African partners we hope to encourage continued discussion on various levels and amongst all relevant stakeholders.