The government will continue to support advancements in knowledge and skills acquisition in the fields of applied science, engineering, and technology, President William Ruto has said.
Ruto said the critical components of nurturing talent, bridging skills, and driving sustainable development remain a key priority for the government.
He said enhancing tertiary education, as one, of the key pledges made by his administration, is being fulfilled.
“We believe in the regional approach to strengthening science, technology, and innovation for responding to the emerging challenges in Africa.
As government, we are working on a strategy to enhance Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) areas in our education sector,” he said.
His remarks were read on his behalf by Prime Cabinet Secretary, Musalia Mudavadi, also the Foreign Affairs and Diaspora Affairs Cabinet Secretary at the opening of the 6th Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering, and Technology (PASET) conference in Nairobi.
The President said Kenya values PASET’s efforts in working towards addressing and confronting the challenges facing Africa in areas of research and bridging the skills gap.
He noted that PASET is the key to Africa’s need to address challenges hindering Africa’s research output and quality, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.
“This conference offers us a precious opportunity to ensure our collective efforts are directed toward fostering socio-economic transformation across Africa,” he said.
In line with the conference theme, ‘Leveraging Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the knowledge and skills ecosystem for Africa’s industrialization’, Ruto said there is a need to recognize the crucial role played by TVETs in building a skilled workforce.
By integrating TVET into the broader knowledge and skills ecosystem, the President said Africa will be able to unlock her full potential for industrialization.
“Perhaps nothing speaks to the challenges facing research in Africa more than the fact that only about 29 percent of research in sub-Saharan Africa – with the exception of South Africa – emanates from applied STEM.
It is further worrying that the STEM research in Africa has been declining by 0.2 annually since 2002, according to World Bank data,” said Ruto.
“Further still, statistics indicate that Africa is estimated to have 198 researchers per million people compared with 428 in Chile, 4,260 in Canada, 4,269 in the United Kingdom, and 4,663 in the United States.
Data also show that only about 7% of the population in Africa is pursuing higher education, compared to 30% worldwide.
Additionally, less than 1% of academic journal articles come from academic institutions in Africa.” he added.
With this in mind, he challenged African countries to the need for an increase in the pool of graduates with doctorate degrees since the pace of PhDs is unable to meet the continent’s needs.
“The number of Ph.D. enrollment against total student enrollment in Universities in Africa is generally low at 2% of the total university student population.” he regretted.
According to the World Bank’s statistics, African Universities should produce over 100,000 PhDs in the next years in order to help reverse the challenges facing Africa today.
Ruto further noted that one of the reasons why Africa struggles to generate impactful research is underfunding.
However, he explained that this might not be deliberate as Africa has its own unique challenges that hinder the deployment of its scarce financial resources to research, and as a result, most African countries’ budgets for research are less than 0.5% of their GDPs, against the recommended ratio of not less than 2% of the GDP.
“While Kenya is one of the countries with the highest funding of research in Africa at 0.8% of the GDP, we are still short of the target and committed to bridging the gap,” he said.
PASET, an Africa-led initiative, focuses on building skills for key economic sectors that support Africa’s socio-economic transformation, spanning from the upper-secondary which is the TVET level to postgraduate education and scientific research.
It has the potential to help the continent address skills and knowledge gaps in key areas of applied sciences, engineering, and technology.
Present were education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu, PS State Department for TVET Esther Muoria, PS State Department for Higher Education and Research Beatrice Inyangala, Claudette Irene the Chair, PASET Governing Council and Minister of State for Education for Rwanda, World Bank representative Muna Salih Meky the Education Practice Manager, Eastern and Southern Africa among other key dignitaries and delegates drawn from the 12 PASAT member countries, Kenya, Rwanda, Benin, Senegal, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Mozambique and Tanzania.
