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| Loyola High School Lab |
I thought
about this thoroughly before I come to this conclusion. I have asked myself
some few questions before I reach this argument; Does the number of Hubs and
Labs that Africa has wright now enough to impact the whole community, What
could be the impact if the youth start to have the co-creative thinking since
high school, Does the current system helps the student to survive if she does
not get a chance to proceed for University, answers to these questions and
several others is what led me to this opinion.
It’s
difficult to have the exact number of hubs and labs in Africa since we are not
sure if all of them have registered although figures shows currently we have around
45 tech hubs, labs, incubators and hacker-spaces registered all over Africa. Taking iHub has a reference point, iHub has around 7,000
members by 2012 and am sure is among the most effective Hubs in Africa you can
prove this by looking on the number of participant in the startups competitions
who are coming from Kenya.
Now, the question is, if the effective hub has
around 7,000 registered users of the hub would it be able to impact the
community of roughly 5 million Kenyan youth who needs the service to save their
local economy and improve their living standards definitely you will see there
is a need of more hubs and labs for tech innovators and facilitators in Africa.
“With almost 200
million people aged between 15 and 24, Africa has the youngest population in
the world. And it keeps growing rapidly” African Economic Outlook. The only way we would at least be able to counter
balance this is to increase the number of hubs and labs by introducing them
directly into schools, otherwise the impact of these labs although will be seen
visually but it will take long time to practically impact the African
communities since they will be just covering some part of the community and not
the whole community as expected.
Secondly, if
the mentality of innovative thinking is developed to the youth in early stages
since high school before they even graduate to enter the university level will
help them to be more creative and encourage more innovative thinking which
would help to impact the community. I don’t think if it is that much expensive
to convert some of the high school labs into hubs. A hub can be anywhere what
matters is the activities that are going on inside the hub and the facilities.
Although most of the funds are coming from outside to fund these hubs and labs
but still if the government were able to put science labs in high schools why
not putting hubs or at least converting some of the science labs into hubs. In May 2003, there were 1,083 registered secondary
schools in Tanzania am sure the number has increased tremendously recently.
This opportunity could be used to create new co- creative thinking hubs in
Tanzania alone.
The current system whereby the youth are
graduating from the high schools without skills or potential to engage them to
the productivity of the nation seems to be destroying the potential minded
Africans at the early stages of their life. If we could be able to use this
approach it might have helped to improve the current situation and makes the
effort to increase technological awareness in Africa even more practical than
the current situation in which a large number of youth in rural areas where
there are no labs and hubs are left behind since they could be not reached
easily since most of these hubs and labs are located in towns and cities.
It is the
time for the African government especially ministries responsible for the
education and technology sector to implement these kinds of strategies in their
governments to improve the sector and encourage innovation at early stages of
the youth carrier which is good initiative for the development of the continent
in general.
Jumanne
Mtambalike
TECH360
Correspondent