China ranks second in S&T publication rates

China has overtaken Japan and the United Kingdom to become the world’s second largest producer of scientific research papers in 2006, after the United States. According to the Institute of Science and Technology Information of China, Chinese scientists published 172 000 papers in major international journals and international academic meeting proceedings in 2006, accounting for 8.4% of the world’s total. Cited papers first-authored by Chinese scientists – an important indicator of scientific creativity – increased by 25.3% in 2006, while the number of times they were cited increased 28.3%. However, China remains 13th in terms of total citation numbers. Chinese papers published in international academic meeting proceedings increased by 15.8% in 2006, despite a global decline of 9%. This suggests that Chinese scientists are increasingly cooperating with foreign scientists.

The 1st Pan-African Prize for Entrepreneurial Teachers

A competition offering awards for the most entrepreneurial teacher in every African country with a top prize of US$10 000 was recently launched by UK-based education charity Teach A Man To Fish in partnership with Educating Africa, a foundation committed to introducing cost effective and sensible education initiatives throughout Africa. According to Nik Kafka, managing director of the charity, ‘there are remarkable teachers across Africa – extraordinary individuals who ‘go the extra mile’ to find creative ways to bring education to their students. They transform limited resources into astonishing results, drive change within their communities and develop educational initiatives which are copied nationwide.
The 1st Pan-African Prize for Entrepreneurial Teachers will recognize those teachers, and acknowledge the huge contribution they make towards improving the lives of their fellow Africans’. Entries were assessed against four criteria of innovation, impact, leadership and creative use of limited resources. The 1st and 2nd prizes were awarded to teachers from Kenya, while the 3rd prize was awarded to a teacher from Cameroon. The country prize winner for South Africa was Steven Carver.

Science education key to ending poverty in Africa

According to Ajaga Nji, deputy vice-chancellor for research and cooperation at Cameroon’s Dschang University, and one of Africa’s foremost thinkers on the causes of poverty, science education is the key to reducing poverty in Africa. ‘The problems of persistent misery and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are not caused by a lack of technology, nor an absence of capital’, he said. Rather, they are the fault of a ‘stifling environment’ in which Africans cannot ‘shake off the yoke of poverty’. According to Nji, the answer to poverty lies with educating poor people through schemes such as open and distance learning. ‘This type of education can reach many people at a low cost, as it needs little infrastructure, such as lecture halls and classrooms’.

African S&T institutions need focus and structure

The consensus of delegates at a Science, Technology & Innovation (ST&I) symposium recently held in Uganda was that the developing world must come up with new institutional working practices and structures if ST&I are to thrive and produce socio-economic growth. Philip Aduma of Maseno University, Kenya, said there was a great need to refocus practices at universities and ST&I institutions in Africa and the rest of the developing world, to better meet the scientific needs of society. ‘Most African countries consume products whose research and development have been done elsewhere, like the pharmaceutical products found in our chemists’. He said the majority of universities have no technology planning officers and scientific work was uncoordinated. Aduma added that lack of research and development funding was one reason for this, but that institutions are also to be blamed for not establishing the right internal structures to generate knowledge, promote their activities or apply their knowledge to society’s problems.

African ministerial council outlines scientific targets

Yaye Kene Gassama, chairperson of the African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology (AMCOST) recently stated at the Third Ordinary Session of AMCOST in Kenya, that there is an encouraging emergence of goodwill towards science, technology and innovation among Africa’s political leadership, but what is now needed is collective commitment. Gassama urged the engagement of greater numbers of people in the implementation of national, regional and continental ST&I agendas, including scientists, policymakers and the general public. She also requested monitoring mechanisms to gauge success and ensure transparency and accountability. The Kenyan minister of science and technology called for a reward scheme for excellence in ST&I, as well as improved opportunities for young people. He also highlighted the need for more African women in the sector. He said African governments must make deliberate efforts to promote programmes to talented young women, and called for strategic partnerships to get more women involved in policymaking. Elsewhere at the meeting, UNESCO announced plans for three science capacity building projects in Africa to enhance the ability of African Union member states to deliver science and technology programmes.

Amazon launches e-book reader

Amazon.com has launched its own e-book reader, Kindle, with free wireless connectivity. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said the online retailer spent three years developing the Kindle reader, which the company is selling online for $399. Kindle is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 292g. Yet it can hold about 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary. Readers can buy anddownload books directly to Kindle – without a PC – through Sprint Nextel’s high-speed EV-DO cellular network without fees or contract commitments. They can also take notes on what they read and store them on Amazon’s servers. Sony already offers an e-book reader that imitates the look of paper by using innovative screen technology. The Kindle screen takes a similar approach and has no backlight to reduce battery use and eyestrain. Bestsellers and new releases will typically sell for $9.99.

Google supplies software to students

Google is to supply computer software (Google Apps) free of charge to students and government workers in Rwanda and Kenya, in a bid to put them on the technical footing of more developed countries. Rwandan government officials and students in both countries will have access to free communications tools including email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing. Three Rwandan institutions (the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology) will initially have access to the Google Apps Education Edition, while the country’s government ministries will be using the Google Apps Standard Edition. During the first phase, around 20 000 users in Rwanda will have access to these services, while a broader countrywide rollout will follow shortly afterwards. In Kenya, the University of Nairobi’s 50 000 students will be the first to be offered Google Apps for Education. These services will be extended to 150 000 Kenyan students at universities across the country. Because Google Apps is delivered via a web browser and has few of the maintenance headaches of traditional software, Google sees the opportunity to reach millions of new users in emerging markets and grab an early share of this new business. The Kenya and Rwanda deals are Google’s first in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rural schools in Namibia access Internet

A new Internet website, Iyaloo Shili Internet Project, to link up rural organisations, schools and small businesses was recently launched in Namibia. According to the project founder, Kashindi Ausiku, her organisation has already created 14 websites, some free for rural schools and others at reasonable fees. The sites that have been created are currently running on the Internet and can be accessed at: www.namtranslations.iway.na/iyaloo.htm. ‘There are great possibilities to be able to see all the rural villages and remote towns on the Internet. We just need to market the concept. And most importantly to transfer website development skills to the regions’.

MXit breaks the language barrier

MXit, the mobile instant messaging solution that offers users a simple and inexpensive way to stay in touch with one another, has further broken down the barriers to effective communication by launching the solution in three more official languages of South Africa, ie, Afrikaans, Xhosa and isiZulu. According to Paul Stemmet, general manager of MXit Lifestyle, ‘everyone wants the ability to chat to their friends and family members in the language of their choice, and making MXit available in several of South Africa’s official languages means that we can cater to such needs while at the same time increasing our user base’. As an example, he refers to recent research by TNS Research Surveys and the UCT Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing that suggests that the youth market, likely to speak Xhosa or isiZulu as a home language, is worth about R7b. Stemmet says that by offering the youth market a solution that speaks to them – and allows them to speak to their friends – in their own language, MXit hopes to further build on its already impressive subscriber base of 5.4m. He believes that the new languages, coupled with the inexpensive nature of chatting via MXit (at a cost of less than 1c, as opposed to approximately 80c for a SMS) will ensure that the current trend of about 10 000 to 12 000 new registrations signing up daily will continue.

Youth into Science Strategy (YISS)

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has recently officially launched the YISS which was developed to (a) enhance science and technology literacy among the public in general and the youth in particular and (b) enrol more and representative youths with talent and potential into science, engineering and technology-based careers. Achieving these goals will go a long way towards addressing some of the skills shortages in South Africa. The target audiences of the YISS are mainly school-going youths and undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. To redress the historical legacy in these knowledge areas, youths from disadvantaged backgrounds (especially young people with disabilities, blacks and young women) are being particularly targeted. Set targets include, among others, doubling the number of youths who participate in the National Science Week activities; and identifying and nurturing at least 5 000 talented youths from disadvantaged background through DST’s maths and science camps by 2010.The implementation of the YISS will be monitored through a tracking system that will be managed by the Human Sciences Research Council.

Bursaries for astrophysic studies

Bursaries in physics and electronics are on offer this month (November) to postgraduate students across Southern Africa from South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope initiative, as part of a programme to strengthen their pool of expertise in these disciplines. Ten bursaries will be awarded to undergraduate students and a further ten to school-leavers. Half of the school-leaver’s bursaries have been set aside for applicants from South Africa’s poverty-stricken Northern Cape. Kim de Boer, manager of human capital development for SKA South Africa, said the bursary programme is aimed at encouraging Africa’s brightest youngsters to follow careers in astronomy and engineering. The SKA project will involve building thousands of satellite-like dishes of 10-15m in diameter to monitor the sky for radio waves. It should open up new areas of science and mathematics and eventually provide insight into the origin of the universe. South Africa’s Northern Cape province and Western Australia have been shortlisted as possible sites for the SKA radio telescope. A final announcement will be made in 2010 and construction work will start in 2014.

Jipsa

According Ann Bernstein and Sandy Johnston from the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), ‘the creation of the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) is a clear sign that the ‘skills revolution’ promised by the adoption of a comprehensive skills development strategy in 1997 has failed to materialise’. A recent examination of four key areas of skills development (ie, sector education and training authorities (Setas), artisans, public service skills shortages and Jipsa itself) by the CDE raised questions and issues from across the education and skills landscape that illustrate the range and depth of the current challenge.

  • Schooling is failing to deliver and training is then expected to compensate for the deficiencies. Jipsa’s progress report lists the many ways in which this is being tried, from top-up and bridging courses to life skills programmes and the usual panacea of mentoring. Between December 2005 and the end of 2006, 900 unemployed graduates – from an estimated pool of 200 000 – received this kind of ‘second education’. While any progress is welcomed, this is a tiny drop in the ocean of need and it is unclear how many of the Jipsa interventions can go to scale.
  • Too much is expected of the skills development framework in ‘add-on’ fields such as enterprise creation, and too little in the core function of producing employable individuals through training. Researchers found that numerous, inflexible ‘one-size-fits-all’ performance indicators for transformation targets and enterprise creation give perverse incentives to Setas to train in ways that do not always address priority skills needs.
  • Institutional performance has been uneven at best. Setas, government departments, and education and training institutions have often performed poorly as individual organisations and never well as a functioning system. Overall co-ordination has been weak, notoriously between the departments of labour and education. Poor communication, for instance, on the status of artisan training within the skills system, has been a stumbling block to overall system performance.
  • Lack of capacity in those who have jobs adds to the problem of vacancies left unfilled by skills shortages. Issues of quality, especially the credibility of qualifications, are politically charged but they need to be tackled honestly and constructively. Experienced executives who can lead institutions and simultaneously help to train the next generation of leaders are scarce on the ground. Institutional memory is disappearing in many institutions or new bodies have been created that have no hope of success without skilled, experienced executives.

Bernstein and Johnston argue that the country needs to move beyond crisis management measures. ‘We need to ensure that SA is not locked into an approach where we have to give each new generation a ‘second education’. We need to start from the harsh reality that in at least three-quarters of our public secondary schools, little if any learning takes place; we fail to produce the desired growing number of maths and science matriculants at a level necessary for tertiary education, despite the existence of a specialist maths and science school programme – Dinaledi – since 2001; and we have high unemployment rates for ill-trained graduates. We cannot shift the burden of totally inadequate educational performance on to employers generally and business in particular through the medium of skills development. It is important not to expect private enterprises to fill the enormous gulf left by a school system that fails most learners.'

Technology Trends is compiled by the Institute for Futures Research.

This Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License


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