Quality Education and Research should be a must not a choice for Africa's Sustainable Transformation

In this era of sustainable development goals, education especially for Africa should be seen as a must but not a choice. The fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG-4) entails the need to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promotion of life-long learning opportunities for all. The call for inclusive education in Africa is and will remain a mid to long term priority. Lack of access to high quality education has prevented millions of people from escaping the cycle of extreme poverty.

Approximately 59 million children of primary school age remain out of school, more than half of the girls or children living in the most remote, conflict – affected, or hardest to reach areas. UNESCO estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa, 17 million primary and secondary teachers will need to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030. Poor people often cannot afford the fees required to send children to school, let alone out of pocket expenses for uniforms, school materials, and exam fees.  As result significant percentage of adolescent girls do not get access to primary school, and early marriage and adolescent pregnancy remain obstacles to moving on to secondary school.

Furthermore, low government spending on education constrains the school built – the fewer the schools, the greater the distance many students have to travel and few teachers are obtained because of poor payment. For example, In Malawi the teacher –student –ratio is 1 to 130. Poor access to education is also compounded by other dimension of poverty such as poor nutrition, which has resulted in 155 million stunted children under the age of five whose cognitive abilities are affected.

Investment in education and research in African countries needs to be given critical consideration. This would reflect the investment in human development which, in turn, should be considered a basic right to all citizens. It is obvious that this will result in highly capacitated   human capital necessary for production and quality service delivery. Quality service delivery requires more investment in Human Capital and Innovation as a key driver for sustainable growth and development. Moreover, human capital investment starts in early childhood, including prenatal and early child nutrition and cognitive stimulation; they continue with high-quality basic education, higher education opportunities, and on-the job training and adult education. Therefore, education at households’ level and within other stems through which our children grow such as churches and family platforms are important as well in impacting both early childhood and adult education. The church in Africa should not be ignorant in educating the families and their children as they do for spiritual growth.
 
Education needs to translate into personal development -socially as well as economically. One needs to question the correlation between the education level attained and the change acquired or the transformation that results from the investment in education. From personal development point of view, education is well appreciated by the extent to which one’s transformation and the change of his or her mindset. At each stage of personal growth, one needs to interrogate whether there is a need for a change or transformation both at individual level and at community or societal levels.

Until you feel the need to change or transform things around you; you cannot undertake the journey towards the transformation. Education helps therefore to address some of the deficiencies in our mindset. In other words, education helps to shape or improve the various faculties in one’s mindset towards his or her greatest version. These faculties comprise the imagination, perception, consciousness, language, judgement, thinking, memory, among others. The beauty is that every human being including people of Africa has the ability to change or shape his or her mindset.

Recently if you ask some people why is it difficult for Africa to transform itself, I have received many arguments saying that the mindset one of the reasons why Africa is not changing it is because of the mindset. How do we address then the challenge linked to the mindset?   Education in its all forms grounded on moral values is one of the solutions. It is an individual responsibility to shape the mindset and bring it to a level where one is capable to change its environment. Talking simply about the mindset it is a dangerous refuge, rather it is important to unpack the faculties of the mindset and address the deficiencies within it. The same brain that can innovate and bring new technological revolution in Europe and USA is the same brain that has the same capacity to do it in Africa as well.

Turning to research and innovation, rethinking research and innovation processes to address the challenges and match the development potentials in Africa is an urgency and this has been mal addressed in the past.  The African Union Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 places science, technology and innovation at the epicenter of Africa’s socio-economic development and growth[3]. The aim is to impact various critical sectors such as such as agriculture, energy, environment, health, infrastructure development, mining, security and water among others.  However, the expected effects are in the areas of eradicating hunger and achieving food security, prevention and control of disease; communication (physical and intellectual mobility); protection of the space; live together-build the society; and wealth.  

 It is unfortunate that most of the innovations focuses on issues related to social sciences with less focus on hard science such as engineering and technology comprising civil and geotechnical engineering; construction and manufacturing engineering; electrical engineering; and chemical engineering; among others. Developed countries have relied on the innovation in these areas which have boosted their technologies; Africa is one of the most consumers.  
In the future, research and innovation in Africa is to have issue or challenged based research and innovation, increase the role of the private sector in promoting and supporting research for development, have motivational grants for the youth or junior researchers to nature them as innovators, and effective positioning of research in the overall development debate by policy makers and development partners.

Let’s change Africa through education, research, and innovation!