11th UNESCO Engineering Week: Thoughts on Africa’s engineering education

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OPINION

By Prof. Kant Ateenyi Kanyarusoke

At the just-ended 11th UNESCO Africa Engineering Week hosted by the Uganda Institution of Professional Engineers at Munyonyo, many good things happened.

For example, just shy of 1,000 leading African engineers from over 25 countries attended the conference – a great networking opportunity for all.

The main theme for the two week programme was Engineering Innovations for Sustainable Development in Africa.

The author had an opportunity to showcase an award-winning innovation that efficiently and cost-effectively cold stores fruits and vegetables, as it quickly solar dries other crops or products simultaneously. But this is not the main subject of this note.

Rather, we will focus on some improvement areas in the conference recommendations. Specifically, we will touch on engineering education gaps in Africa.

Engineering education – The main recommendation was on industry-university cooperation to produce more competence-based learning and work-ready graduates.

Challenges to do this (e.g. number of willing industry partners, bureaucracy in curriculum development, length of undergraduate study years vis-à-vis study material, etc), and how to overcome them, were left untouched.

It was correctly recognised that ‘engineering’ is the most important activity in transforming natural resources to wealth, contributing upwards of 70% (my own computations in Uganda’s mixed farming value addition products put it at 80%+) of total value. However, recommendations were silent on actions to make this fact obvious to everyone, including policymakers and the public.

Moreover, it was stressed that if Africa is to achieve the United Nations sustainable development goals by 2030, her ‘engineer to population ratio’ had to increase from the present 0.02% (2 per 10,000) to 0.18% or 18 per 10,000 - a 9-fold factor in 5 years. Despite this tall order, there was no mention of actions to approach it. My own suggestion here is that the enlightened engineers and other society members start a crusade to bias youngsters, including their own and their neighbours’ children, towards the profession.

Just like a traditional cattle keeper or agricultural farmer does to offspring and their friends. There are ways to do so. Talking about engineering education, most people, including many conference participants, tend to think about degree awarding institutions. Indeed, recommendations and even the most useful challenges on the subject by Monica Musenero, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, were addressed to deans of engineering faculties.

However, important as the graduate engineer may be, s/he is often helpless and/or underutilised if without adequate support from technical staff in the form of technicians and artisans.

The artisan in the form of a machinist, a mason, a welder, a carpenter, a fitter, etc, is the real foot soldier of engineering.

Outward quality and aesthetic appeal to attract customers on first sight depend on artisanal skills used in a physical product.

Today, some of this skilling is being replaced by expensive hi-tech machinery, but for a country/continent yearning for the transformation of its people from peasantry to industrial, a debate on training and development of its artisanal skills would have been most helpful. The technician may be looked at as the field commander of engineering, while the well-trained graduate engineer may be regarded as a General, or ‘Master planner’. The tragedy in Uganda and Africa is that not only do we have too few ‘Generals’, but we are also starving them of necessary field commanders and foot soldiers.

In limited hi-tech mechanisation, a crude rule-of-thumb ratio for these is 1 Eng to 5 Techs to 25 Artisans. This means that if a country is graduating say 800 engineers every year, we would expect roughly 4,000 technicians and 20,000 artisans for everyone to concentrate on what s/he was best trained for and eventually – as a team – deliver what society can be proud of.

Therefore, the current craze in Africa of converting technical colleges and polytechnics to universities, which then drop artisanal and technician courses without building proportionately more replacements, should have been challenged by the conference recommendations.

The writer is an industrial mechanical solar energy engineer and professor of agro-value addition at MMU, Fort Portal. kanyarusokek@gmail.com