The Sunday News
Fredrick Mandizvidza
Mankind is favoured with the talent for organising itself and its socio-economic activity far above any other creation. The quest for modernisation through an industrialised economic formation is one activity that distinguishes human beings from any other creation.
Through demonstration of sophisticated capabilities for achieving advanced socio-economic development, societies involuntarily locate themselves in a perking order. The more modern an economic architecture is, the higher the standards of living enjoyed by its citizens. In this matrix of things, a citizenry endowed with a higher order of talent, dexterity and sophistication to creatively innovate and manipulate leading-edge technologies to rapidly offer the most exciting and latest scientific solutions to global problems, edges out rivalry in today’s globally competitive world.
Nations that embark on a deliberate journey towards self-organisation and capacitation through systematic human capital planning, development, talent identification and maximum exploitation of their national talent to achieve the highest impacts in targeted fields of human activity, tend to gravitate towards economic prosperity faster than others. Thus, the major differentiator between successful and unsuccessful economies remains their respective peoples’ ability and agility to organise themselves and exploit collective and innovative talent anchored on cutting-edge technologies to scientifically resolve both man-made and natural problems.
Such an advanced level of organisation manifests itself in the form of industrialisation. In that context, industrialisation is high level human activity that is attained through high level strategic human capital planning, development, training and deployment.
Preparing a robust human capital for industrialisation is a task for the most foresighted and requires meticulous fulfillment of critical fundamentals in the process. It is of paramount importance for citizens, particularly the academics, to make an extra effort to, and to actually, appreciate the complex dynamics of this phenomenon as it unfolds to achieve an industrialised or knowledge economy before laying criticism against it. Ushering in a dispensation like the STEM-driven industrial revolution, whose impact, by its nature, is historic, does not only call for unprecedented boldness, but also demands the handing down of a shared vision with exceptional clarity, to mobilise a critical mass of support for its successful implementation.
Opposition to STEM Education
Claims that there are many unemployed STEM graduates roaming the streets are abounding and yet they are without any substance. This school of thought posits that the 2016 A-Level STEM Initiative is a “misplaced effort”, hence a “waste of resources”. The anti-STEM movement further advances the notion that since Zimbabwean universities have been teaching and training students in disciplines of pure sciences, therefore, the country’s education system has always been stemitised.
Clearly, if all these assertions were true, then the need for stemitising our education system would not arise.
The majority of the stakeholders must understand the STEM-driven industrialisation’s guiding philosophy, roadmap and the anticipated endgame. Obviously, some will need it explained in simple layman’s terms, whereas others will only understand it after its drivers delve into a long process of untangling the deep and complex paraphernalia attendant to this not unimportant matter for the country’s prosperity. I am convinced that with the failure by some stakeholders to appreciate the dynamics of the STEM-driven industrial revolution, the risk of losing them in the process is high.
There is also a section of our society that is of a predominantly technical mindset and will only appreciate matters presented, laid down and explained in technical dimensions. Efforts must be made to accommodate the concerns of this group too. There are also others who, naturally, never appreciate what is going on, no matter how clear issues are spelt out. They operate in the negativity default mode. For the sake of this and other related groups, the drivers of this STEM-driven industrialisation revolution remain obliged to tirelessly provide the needed clarity at every turn of this critical journey in the history of our country.
However, it is also natural that when driving such a grand human endeavour, there will always exist a segment that, for known or unknown reasons, resolves to vigorously, deliberately and conveniently refuse to understand any explanation, regardless of the clarity with which its vision is articulated. In academic terms, the existence of such an opposing remnant is a healthy part of a dynamic dialectical and academic discourse. Their important role is to keep burning the flame of academic conversations around the matter at hand. This way, all minds are kept open, alive and engaged.
However, a close analysis of our education system reveals that there seems to have arisen a section of people who conveniently choose to forget that one of the many purposes of an education system is to adequately prepare its products to become relevant citizens, wired with capabilities and competencies for socio-economic problem solving. Isaac Newton once argued that a good knife is one that is “fit for purpose”. Upon further interrogation about what he really meant by that, he offered a simple but thought provoking response: “It is one that cuts well.” Therefore, Zimbabwe’s human capital’s fitness for purpose only measured in its ability to resolve the country’s socio-economic challenges.
Application of cutting-edge technologies in solving practical socio-economic problems is the hallmark of STEM. Application of the latest technologies impact on the types of degree programmes taken at universities. Thus, degree programmes vary in content and utility value, depending on the technologies embraced by the respective institutions at the design stage of their degree curriculum. Invariably, the relevance of their graduates to society will differ although all of them have BSc degrees in basic sciences.
Therefore, properly educated and trained graduates from a good system of education are fit for purpose, which is about solving problems through application of cutting-edge technologies. They create tools, platforms and algorithms with which to unlock socio-economic logjams of their nation; they create value and wealth from the country’s resources. They are useful in the different spheres of life for which they are trained and educated. Properly trained engineers resolve engineering problems.
They don’t contend with the sight of perennial potholes, urban water logging and unending traffic jams. Well trained agronomists resolve agricultural challenges faced by their country. We wouldn’t be having hunger stalking our people on an annual basis if the country’s agronomists were fit for their purpose. Adequately skilled economists are those who are sources of solutions to the country’s economic woes in all their complexities. The failure to re-engineer viable economic models is testimony to the shortcomings embedded in our system of training and development. Cadres educated and trained for a knowledge economy operate in the digital dimension and not in the analogue dimension.
Likewise, if the Zimbabwe system of education is to be twitched a notch higher, it would have a rich scientific base which could also be easily demonstrated by a high scientific output driven by its scientists. In fact, the evidence of a high density of scientific (ie properly stemitised) human capital must speak for itself through prolific research and innovation output. The generated knowledge must be protected by a robust intellectual property rights framework to ensure that it is exploited for the maximum benefit of the country. There must be a system in place by which the finest of our researchers, scientists, engineers, inventors and innovators are not only recognised, but are also incentivised, attracted and retained for the country to enrich its pool of these experts. Our IHL must boast of teams of high profile world class scholars, scientists, inventors and innovators.
In fact, the hallmark of a good stemitised education system is the competitiveness of its universities and populace in advanced R&D and patenting. In any case, the degree of relevance, currency and appropriateness of any education system is demonstrated by the quality of solutions its citizens provide to problems based on the appropriateness of the chosen technologies. Any system of education that is grounded in bookish and elaborate theoretical convolutions with low knowledge yields divorced from socio-economic problems only mimics a dog chasing its own tail.
Graduates moulded by a good education outfit have the ability, insight and foresight to ably read national agendas, pursue national priorities with a passion and to think solutions that fit in the framework of the national vision and beyond. So, if this were true of our education system, then Zimbabwe wouldn’t have many of the challenges it is currently saddled with whose solutions squarely reside in the STEM domain. Zimbabwe must never be lulled into scientific and technological dormancy on the grounds that she has one of the highest literacy rates on the continent because high literacy rate is not an end in itself.
This is just a necessary but not sufficient condition for the industrialisation of the country. Fortunately, such a dummy cannot sell to Zimbabweans. Instead, we must view high literacy rate as a golden opportunity that we must grab and up the game into the scientific and technological domains anchored by advanced R&D.
Global competition and national competitiveness in the knowledge era have shifted from a competition for natural resources only to a competition for high level data management, knowledge creation and application, as well as technological innovation, all rooted in scientific R&D. Today’s digital age requires digitised graduates and professionals with a mindset designed to push frontiers of human endeavour traditionally believed to be out of bounce for the African scholar to heights never witnessed before. We have what it takes to drive this economy into new frontiers on the basis of a stemitised education system.
Our education system, in spite of its apparent strengths, also has an inherent and self-defeating weakness which calls for admission if it’s going to be rectified. It can be argued that its major problem is that it produces products (graduates) that are not cut out for problem solving, innovation, invention and scientific creativity. Sadly, the few that make it in this regard are not celebrated at all. Churning out thousands of graduates who are seekers of employment and not creators of new technologies, products, industries and markets only creates a fatalistic socio-economic conundrum. Apparently, this is not the time to attempt a diagnosis of the underlying reasons for such a syndrome of denial and opposition to the STEM revolution.
STEM Education as a Strategy for Industrialisation
At this moment in time all efforts should be directed towards the unpacking of the STEM vision, which is the primary motivation for this instalment.
I am alive to the earlier arguments by the pro-STEM movement, which averments I fully embrace and to which I subscribe.
Zimbabwe does not have any STEM graduates roaming the streets. The Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development, Professor Jonathan Moyo has rightly argued that what we have are graduates with scintific and engineering backgrounds but who themselves, are not stemitised by contemporary standards. Obviously, this has left some unanswered questions among the members of the public although in his widely published article, Dr Godfrey Gandawa, the Deputy Minister in the same Ministry, gave an in-depth unpacking of the STEM vision in which he thoroughly and adequately addressed most of these questions. Nonetheless, there is no harm in providing further clarity regarding this topical issue.
For starters, stemitisation must be viewed from two standpoints. First, stemitisation is a strategic option for human capital development that enables our education system to not only inculcate competencies in its trainees for the application of scientific knowledge to socio-economic challenges faced by humanity using cutting-edge technologies, but it also a strategy that seeks to mainstream a scientific or evidence-based culture of resolving society’s problems. It is an approach that is grounded on advanced scientific research and development (R&D), innovation and technological creativity. Two critical issues stand out from that understanding.
Number one
The approach requires that the trainees acquire scientific competencies and skills relevant to society with particular emphasis on industrial development with an obvious spill-over effect on other facets of human development.
Number two
The basis for such skills development and a “solutions orientation” is the application of cutting-edge technologies, themselves being a function of scientific R&D, innovation and technological creativity.
A critical point to make here is that, by and large, STEM graduates must distinguish themselves from conventionalists by their suppleness, agility and ability to manipulate, produce and apply cutting-edge technologies towards resolving society’s challenges. In that context, pure sciences and mathematics are key foundational knowledge bodies required for the preparation of future STEM students upon their entry into university education. Given that “cutting-edge technology” is a concept in constant transition and evolution relative to different historical epochs and their respective socio-economic formations, the need to continuously define and redefine the nature of “modern-day cutting-edge technologies” remains paramount.
This fact becomes much more acute if and when taken in the context of preparing young generations for jobs of the future. Professor Jonathan Moyo amply clarified this point when he argued that if STEM was the mere teaching of sciences, technology and engineering courses, then Isaac Newton would have been the most stemitised scientist of all times. Yet for all intense and purposes and measured by the standards of a knowledge economy, he doesn’t fall in this category of scholars. The parameters and identifiable factors that separate a stemitised and non-stemitised graduate clearly lie outside Isaac Newton’s (and many other university graduates’) brackets of scientific and technological endeavor.
Secondly, there are technological advances and scientific capabilities that STEM graduates must put on display when applying evidence-based scientific solutions using cutting-edge technologies to resolve society’s problems. A STEM graduate demonstrates a higher order of ingenuity, dexterity and innovative thinking to resolve complex multi-disciplinary problems characteristic of modern-day and future socio-economic models. Today’s problems draw together a multiplicity of complexities with an obvious demand for open minds that embrace multivariate technology platforms to enable their effective and efficient resolution.
Suffice it to say that today’s cutting-edge technologies are a function of digitisation. Hence STEM graduates must be netizens; technology savvy professionals and practitioners who can easily maneuver their way through emerging complex problems riding on the power of cutting- and bleeding-edge technologies. There is no better way of defining a true STEM graduate than one who locates him/herself in the league of professionals that are prolific in providing robust and scientific solutions to existing and emerging problems.
One cannot imagine having unemployed stemitised engineers, agricultural experts, scientists and a host of other professionals. It is also unimaginable to have stemitised engineers living in amicable coexistence with, for example, communities of potholes, endemic load shedding, perennial food shortages, crippling industrial underperformance and high morbidity and mortality rates related to neglected tropical diseases or “diseases of the poor”. The essence of STEM graduates is for them to be prolific in the identification of society’s problems and to provide solutions thereto. Because of the multiplicity of society’s problems, it is practically inconceivable to have problem solvers who can be unemployed.
Once we say there are unemployed STEM graduates, we are inferring that, either our definition of a STEM graduate is wrong or that by their very nature, the STEM degree programmes offered by our Institutions of Higher Learning are inherently defective. However, in the case of Zimbabwe, both of them are true. We do not have STEM graduates roaming the streets because we hadn’t started on that path yet. Also by design, our degree programmes are non-stematic.
Scientific thinking ought to guide our way of reacting to situations. For instance, when some from among our people claim that quails have medicinal properties, automatically a scientific approach is required to deal with such a scientific assertion.
Two dimensions would address the matter. Number one, both the quail (chihuta’s) meat and eggs must be tested in a modern biomedical laboratory to get scientific evidence of whether or not they do have the so called medicinal properties. Which part or parts, if any, of the quail has/have the medicinal properties and in what concentration? Number two, research should be done to establish the potential impact on the ecosystem and food webs of commercialising and uncontrolled harvesting of quails. Armed with scientific evidence, the authorities could then come up with appropriate policy frameworks.
Who knows, Zimbabwe might have stumbled onto another deposit of “quail diamonds”. What if, by a “blanket ban” on quails, the country is shutting a door to opportunities of solutions to its (as well as Africa and global community’s) healthcare challenges? And surely, if there is no medicinal value in quail meat and eggs, authorities can carefully advise our people to avoid being gullible, falling prey to economic fraudsters bent on taking advantage of people’s challenges and ignorance to fleece them out of their hard earned bond coins, hard currency and the yet to come bond notes. The point is that, scientific evidence should guide and lead policy making in all areas of life.
Planning, Developing and Training Human Capital
Economies that have adopted the STEM strategy to change their social-economic game plans have deliberately gone scientific in terms of human capital planning, development and training. Once they decided to take the scientific and technological route towards knowledge-driven economies, countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, among others, defined talent pipelines spanning over several years. They became very practical and deliberate in terms of the quantities of the human capital needs of each economic sector, the kind of skills and competencies required and at what point in the value chain of their growing economies.
Singapore, for example, put in place a twenty-five-year talent pipeline development plan divided into five-year milestones under the A-Star mantra with a strategic focus on biomedical research and development. Today, Singapore has over three thousand biomedical research scientists across the globe leading research consortia and projects of historic and scientific import. To that end, Singapore has become a global leader in that area of specialization albeit with little or no base for natural resources to talk about.
An important learning point is that the mere teaching of sciences and mathematics as well as engineering and technology will not translate into industrialisation let alone sustainable economic growth. A lot of strategic human capital and economic planning must go into this matrix. Serious questions need to asked and answers provided at all levels of the human capital value chain so that the education system is directed towards focusing on producing skills and competencies required for specific economic outputs in line with specific socio-economic milestones. All IHL must aim at producing skills that will fit into defined gaps driven by a clear national research and development agenda whose ultimate goal is the industrialization of the country.
With well-planned talent outputs, the development of human capital must follow an unambiguous trajectory. People development is meant to make scientists, innovators, inventors and employees relevant in the face of fast technological advances. Therefore, in-service and refresher programmes play this important role. Their skills and know-how must be systematically sharpened to enable them to apply cutting-edge technologies through technological innovation and scientific creativity. Commitment to life-long learning must be transformed into part of the national cultural DNA that characterises every citizen of the country. Both the private and public sectors must invest in this process.
An economy that is planning for growth never ceases to educate and train its people. IHL must have in place elaborate strategic plans for the training of national talent. For instance, the idea of universities driven by niches is not misplaced at all.
That is part of a systematic human capital training system and development which fits well into the national economic agenda. Universities, polytechnics, research institutions and other training institutions must not be allowed to just train for the sake of income generation or just to be seen to be doing something without focusing on well examined purposes that feed into the national economic agenda such as industrialization. Each one of them must train well planned numbers of students that are fed into the national human capital development grid, seamlessly aligned to the national socio-economic aspirations of the country. This is what distinguishes us as human beings from wild animals; our socio-economic activity is deliberate and focused, hence our human capital training and development must also be strategically focused.
To achieve this our training and development process should be done in response to industry sector technology-driven needs.
Questions about what competencies and skills are required to drive which part of the economy become pertinent. The same is true of the quantum of human talent needed for each economic sub-sector and for the economy as a whole. These are processes that should never be left to spontaneity if we are to remain in control of the intended outcomes of our economic activity. We must be deliberate in unlocking our national talent which is critical for the country’s industrialisation.
(To be continued next week when the writer discusses the fundamentals of the STEM revolution)
Fredrick Mandizvidza is the Chief Executive Officer for the Zimbabwe Manpower Development Fund (ZIMDEF) under the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development. The article represents personal views of the writer. He is a doctoral scholar of Technology Entrepreneurship and can be contacted on [email protected].
