http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i26/26a02301.htm
From the issue dated March 7, 2008
Africa Steps Up Efforts to Train Top Scientists
A new math institute leads the way in a drive to educate scholars to take
on the continent's myriad problems
By MEGAN LINDOW
Cape Town, South Africa
Kidist Zeleke used to think that her degree in mathematics wouldn't get
her very far in life. She spent her time at Haramaya University, in
Ethiopia, memorizing proofs and theorems, with little understanding of
how such abstract concepts could be put to use in the broader world.
"In our country, if you do math or physics, the only chance you have is
to be a teacher, and it's a very low-paid job," she says with a shrug.
"We only know mathematics on paper."
And so it might have been for Ms. Zeleke, had she not been selected to
participate in a new program for bright young mathematicians drawn from
across the continent.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, in Cape Town, South
Africa, offers one of the first working examples of a growing effort
develop a cadre of highly trained, practically minded scientists and
mathematicians who can solve problems in health care, agriculture, and in
general mitigate the dearth of homegrown scientific research that plagues
much of the continent. Educators, policy makers, and donors across Africa
who are developing these programs hope they will also stem a continuing
brain drain.
A second major project, the African University of Science and Technology,
is scheduled to open this year in Abuja, Nigeria.
The continent desperately needs advanced scientists and mathematicians to
spur its development. But most of Africa's universities have proved ill
equipped to produce such expertise. Historically geared toward training
civil servants rather than the researchers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers
who are crucial to building a modern economy, African universities have
long faced a crisis of relevance. Now they are striving to transform
themselves, but the task has proved difficult. Universities have been
neglected and underfinanced for decades, beset by problems as varied as
low Internet connectivity, dilapidated campuses, and poorly qualified
instructors.
Relevant Training
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, small in scale, offers a
successful model for surmounting the obstacles, its supporters say. It
admits about 50 university graduates per year from around the continent
into its nine-month program. No degrees are awarded, but students take a
variety of short courses, preparing them to earn advanced degrees
elsewhere.
The Cape Town campus is the first in what is envisioned as 15 institutes
across the continent. The African Mathematical Institutes Network, as it
is called, is sponsored by the New Partnership for African Development,
which is the development program of the African Union, an
intergovernmental group of nations.
The network is proceeding with plans to develop four more campuses. The
next one, it is hoped, will open in Abuja this August, in conjunction
with the African University of Science and Technology. Others are planned
for Madagascar, Sudan, and Uganda, although none has financing yet.
The math institute operates as a partnership among three South African
institutions: the Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and the
Western Cape, joined by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in
England, and by the University of Paris-Sud XI. The project is supported
by the South African government and private donors, including the Ford
Foundation.
Founded in 2003 by Neil Turok, a Cambridge cosmologist long troubled by
the plight of bright Africans who have been denied educational
opportunities, the Cape Town campus seems an unlikely setting for a
pan-African science revolution. Housed in a refurbished old hotel around
the corner from the beach, in a popular surfing area called Muizenberg,
the institute enrolls 53 students from 20 African countries.
Students, postgraduate tutors, and visiting lecturers — about 30 in all
over the course of the year — live, eat, work, and study together. The
nine-month program is divided into a series of short courses on various
topics, each taught by a lecturer brought in from Europe, the United
States, or, increasingly, Africa. In the final part of the program,
students complete essays, working with faculty members at South African
universities as advisers.
In sharp contrast to most African universities, where computers are
scarce, each student here has a machine in the computer lab, with a fast
Internet connection. The computers let them learn to perform complex
modeling operations using free software developed in South Africa.
The courses cover a variety of topics — including quantum mechanics,
climate modeling, and the Black-Scholes model, which is used for
stock-market calculations — but are selected for their relevance to
African needs. Most of the students who complete the courses go on to
master's-degree or Ph.D. programs, typically at South African
universities. The hope is that many will return to teach in their home
countries.
"Even 50 well-trained students per year entering high-level science is
significant, and if they become academics in Africa teaching large
numbers of undergraduates and engaging in teacher training, the
multiplier effect is very large," says Mr. Turok in an e-mail message.
His father, Ben, is a member of Parliament and has also been involved in
the institute.
Midway through the nine-month program, Ms. Zeleke talks excitedly about
the ways in which she is learning how math can be used. "Here we are
trying to apply our mathematics to solve real problems," she says. "We
are learning about bioinformatics and the epidemiology of infectious
diseases like HIV and malaria." She eventually wants to return to
Ethiopia and teach in a program similar to the Cape Town institute's.
A Shift in Focus
For many years, the needs of higher education have been secondary to
other concerns in Africa. During the 1980s and 90s, donor agencies and
national governments shifted their support to elementary and secondary
education, in the belief that basic education was more critical to
economic development than increasing the number of university graduates.
But that view has begun to change. The first signal came in 2000 from the
World Bank, which released a report, "Higher Education in Developing
Countries: Peril and Promise," that recognized the key role of
universities in contributing to growth and development.
That same year, four American philanthropies — the Carnegie Corporation
and the Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller Foundations — pledged
$150-million to strengthen African higher education, with emphases on
building academic research and improving universities' capacity to train
more researchers.
Countries beyond Africa — including China, India, and Brazil — have also
become more involved in the continent's higher education. The Indian
Institute of Technology, in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), for example, is a
partner in the African Institute of Science and Technology.
At a 2005 summit of the Group of Eight, an international forum of nations
representing the world's leading economies, Britain's Commission for
Africa called for as much as $3-billion to be spent on centers of
excellence in science and technology.
The promised support has barely started to materialize, however, in part
because structures still have to be set up to make use of the funds.
Addressing the U.S. House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Africa and
Global Health last year, Calestous Juma, an African higher-education
expert, identified African universities as a key area for U.S.-African
cooperation and emphasized the need to support science education in
particular.
"Universities in most countries are engines of development and must be so
in Africa as well," said Mr. Juma, a professor of international
development in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University.
Although resources are thin, African governments also appear more willing
to support science and technology, says Linda Nordling, editor of
Research Africa, a science-policy magazine based in Cape Town. "There are
plenty of plans and strategies," she says. "Ethiopia is updating its
national science strategy. Rwanda is already investing. Kenya is putting
science at the heart of its 2020 vision."
In January 2007, at a summit of African Union leaders held in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, leaders declared 2007 as the year of African science and
pledged to "promote science education" by increasing their spending on
scientific research and development to 1 percent of their countries'
annual gross domestic product by 2010.
Most African countries currently spend less than half a percent of their
GDP. The union's Consolidated Plan for African Science has been an
important political force for programs like the math network.
Money Problems
Finances, however, remain a problem. The math institute, despite its
support from the South African government and private foundations and
donors, struggles to meet its annual budget of $800,000. And money still
has to be raised for the $30-million network project.
The African University of Science and Technology, by contrast, is
comparatively well financed, although the project — which initially
called for the construction of four campuses, serving separate regions of
Africa — has faced delays and for now is limited to the campus in Abuja.
In part to overcome the problem of limited resources, a growing number of
universities, within Africa and abroad, are working together on research
and degree programs. The math institute is one example. In fact, South
African universities, which are better financed than most
higher-education institutions in other African countries, are
increasingly involved in many such linkages.
At Stellenbosch University, the South African Centre for Epidemiological
Modelling and Analysis, selected as a center of excellence by the South
African government in 2006, is involving researchers from other African
countries in studying diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.
Using the linkages model, the Carnegie Corporation recently announced a
new graduate-level training program in science and engineering for
African academics. It seeks to build and finance networks of
universities, research institutes, and government laboratories in which
universities collaborate to train and provide research opportunities for
aspiring professors.
The hope of those behind many of these programs is that after students
receive their Ph.D.'s, they will take their expertise back to their home
countries in Africa, where it will have a ripple effect.
"We don't want to compete with the universities," says Fritz Hahne,
director of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. "We want the
universities to feel that this is their place, and that they can come
here. We need them, and they need us."
As for Ms. Zeleke and two of her Ethiopian classmates, they are already
planning their return home from Cape Town. "We need to have an AIMS in
Ethiopia," she says.
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http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 54, Issue 26, Page A23
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s. e. anderson is author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime
http://blackeducator.blogspot.com
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