In Science, We Prosper

Whether in commodities, manufacturing or services, the private sector in Africa has spent decades grabbing the skills they need wherever and whenever they can. Often that means expensive expat salaries, relocations or international structures that focus on adding value away from the continent.

At the same time, a 20-year trend of under-investment in higher education and science in Africa has left many academics cut adrift from the needs of industry. Too often, they can be found pursuing their own research, and more aligned with the wishes of international funding bodies than local industry.

Take agriculture, one of the most important industries across Africa and our largest employer, contributing 32pc of gross domestic product (GDP). Despite the obvious need, only two percent of our students at university are studying agriculture-related fields, almost exactly the same as Europe, where the sector contributes to 1.4pc of GDP, according to the World Bank.

In most universities, graduates acquire degrees and knowledge that has little practical application in Africa’s changing economic development, making their investment of time and money into wasted resources.

Indeed, World Bank vice-president for Africa, Makhtar Diop, estimates that just 11pc of African university students are studying subjects with high employability, while 70pc are enrolled in areas that have huge cohorts of unemployed graduates. Planet Earth Institute has recently partnered with the World Bank to support business-savvy scientific education and research in Africa.

Leading businessman, Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder of the conglomerate Bharti Enterprises, which operates in Africa across telecommunications and manufacturing, said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, that he feels welcome as an investor on the continent. However, he is always shocked by the lack of industry-ready skills.

“Skills are not available in Africa. And if they are available, they are so expensive. People in Africa who have the necessary skills want European or American salaries,” he says.

Ultimately, the race for tertiary level enrolment has led to a superficial increase in numbers but not enough impact in providing our industries with the local skills and talent they need. As the 2014 African Economic Outlook report points out, there is also a long history of “a university system, which has traditionally been focused on educating for public sector employment, with little regard for the needs of the private sector”.

Policies must seek to correct this, and fast, before the numbers of qualified but industrially irrelevant graduates turns the youth population bulge into a curse.

One such potential policy I feel deserves further analysis is an idea currently being floated in Mauritius. The government of Mauritius has a long established and successful Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy. Under this scheme, all profitable firms – whether local or foreign-owned – are required to spend two percent of their chargeable income on local socioeconomic and environmental development projects.

Now, a campaign headed by the head of the Mauritian Centre for Biomedical and Biomaterials Research, Dhanjay Jhurry, is calling for a portion of this amount to be spent specifically on scientific projects. He calls his proposal ‘Corporate Scientific Responsibility’. In a recent interview, Jhurry argued that the “concept is novel and has not been used anywhere else in the world. Mauritius could champion this idea and demonstrate intellectual creativity.”

For some countries on the mainland, particularly those without well-established CSR policies, this kind of initiative is perhaps ambitious. Likewise, a program of this type would not paper over other the significant cracks in Africa’s investment in science, such as large scale public research and development spending. Almost all nations having failed to hit a one percent target set years ago.

Nevertheless, corporate scientific responsibility directly addresses one of the continent’s critical long-term sustainable growth challenges: that of developing local skills and knowledge production. While individual programs and partnerships between universities and business are increasing in patches, particularly in investment hotspots such as Nairobi, Kenya, this simple concept could reinforce the necessity of fostering these linkages. It would turn them from the exception to the norm.


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