South Africa: U.S. Funds for African Science
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
31 July 2008
Posted to the web 31 July 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
AFRICAN scientific and engineering research is to receive a $2,4m boost over the next 2½ years in the form of a grant from New York's Carnegie Corporation, it was announced this week.
The grant is meant to improve teaching in African universities and increase the number of doctorates in science.
SA and Africa as a whole lag behind the developed world in terms of the number of people graduating with doctorates, but SA is ahead of China and India on this ratio, the vice-president of the National Research Foundation's Research and Innovation Support Agency, Dr Albert van Jaarsveld, said yesterday.
SA's production of an average 27 doctorates per million citizens and about 1200 doctorates a year is in contrast to Europe's 100-200 people with doctorates per million.
Only about 560 (40%) of the South African doctorates were in the fields of engineering, science and technology. But this was still ahead of the rest of Africa, Van Jaarsveld said.
India and China produced "10 or under 10" PhD graduates per million population, but the immensity of their populations mitigated this -- China's output was 40000 PhDs a year, which was the same in absolute numbers as the US, he said.
The grant is expected to be extended after the first 30 months come to an end, said Arlen Hastings, director of the Science Initiative Group, a US-based international body dedicated to fostering science in developing countries.
"We don't expect Rise (the Regional Initiative in Science and Education) to end after the current grant.
"Rather, follow-up funding will be sought to ensure that the current networks are supported for long enough to complete at least one full PhD training cycle," she said.
Three networks of universities in sub-Saharan Africa were named on Monday as the first to benefit from the grant and each would receive a $800000 (R5,9m) grant.
One of the three networks chosen out of a pool of 48 proposals from institutions in 29 countries is the African Materials Science and Engineering Network, led by Prof Lesley Cornish of the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Chemical and Materials Engineering.
"It's marvellous and it should be good for everyone involved," said Cornish .
The materials science network has its secretariat at the University of Namibia, and was going to use the money to bring more postgraduate students into the field, and its satellite fields, and also to retain teaching staff and improve equipment, said Cornish.
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The other networks include institutes at universities in Malawi, Namibia and Tanzania.
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