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Statement of Problem

Introduction | Need for Scientists in Academia and Industry

 

Introduction

Government, industry and academic institutions throughout Africa need highly trained scientists who are dedicated to building the African scientific community and who can play pivotal roles in the development and management of Africa’s vast mineral and petroleum wealth, as well as water and geothermal resources. Capacity in science fields allied with natural resource exploitation is extremely limited in much of Africa, and in places where such capacity exists, financial pressures, and an inability to attract a sufficient number of historically disadvantaged (i.e. non-white and female) students into academia threaten to undermine it. Hence, the problem is how to effectively build up a workforce of highly trained scientists to meet the long-term workforce requirements within Africa’s natural resource sector and, at the same time, reverse the current brain drain of many of Africa’s best and brightest scientists, and the demise of specialist training facilities on the continent.

Need for Scientists in Academia and Industry

During the 2004 Mining Investment Conference in Cape Town (Indaba, 2004), the African mining industry commented on the rapidly increasing age profile of engineers and scientists employed within their organizations. A similar trend is obvious in academic institutions and para-statal organizations in South Africa. This situation is especially pressing in the mining related sector as a result of the mining charter that seeks to promote black empowerment and meaningful participation of formerly disadvantaged South Africans in the mineral resources industry. Currently the pool of highly educated, skilled black and female Africans is too small to supply the industry with sufficient numbers of good graduates and an atmosphere of severe competition has been created, which threatens university science and technology programs, especially within highly specialist domains such as geophysics. The South African situation is not unique and is mirrored by similar scenarios throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries such as Angola or the Democratic Republic of Congo, training capacity is all but lost, yet demand for local skilled personnel is high as a result of a growing oil and mining industry and government pressure to employ local staff.

AfricaArray has been designed to meet these various pressures for a skilled workforce by initially rebuilding the geophysics training capacity in Africa, and then by propagating the model of tightly coupled training and research activities to other science and technology fields allied to Africa’s natural resource sector.