Mr Deji Akomolafe has observed that Nigerian universities and training centres use the obsolete curriculum in teaching students which is a major reason for graduate unemployability in the country. Mr Akomolafe made this statement while briefing journalists at the ongoing African Engineering Education Association International Conference (AEEA-IC, 2019) at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.
With the theme ‘Strengthening Engineering Education Through Innovation and Collaboration’ the ongoing conference, in its 7th edition, started on September 24th and will run through to the 27th at the Jelili Omotola Multipurpose Hall, University of Lagos. Attendees are drawn from all walks of life comprising engineering experts, students, IT gurus and stakeholders, who have converged to proffer enduring solutions to the gap between town and gown and its resultant infrastructural deficit on the continent, problems believed to be the responsibility of engineers who are supposedly trained to cater to such needs.
A staff solutions architect for VMWARE based in the United States, Mr Akomolafe said virtualise Africa is a corporate responsibility programme VMWARE created to help in some measure, solve the problems of youth unemployment and knowledge gap in Africa.
“We realise that people are interested in technologies and they gravitate towards the easy-to-access disciplines like web development and programming but stay away from the complicated high-paying essential components like virtualization, cloud and technology’. He began, while observing that “the reason they do that is because those disciplines require extensive investment and not just financially but in resources like network access, data access and general infrastructure. What we are trying to do is if Africa is claiming that they have high unemployment rate, we need to be able to reevaluate the reason for this. Is it because the jobs are not there or that the jobs are out there but we are not producing professionals who can take advantage of the jobs?” Akomolafe queried.
He went ahead to pinpoint the reason why there is a disconnect between education and its direct impact on the society noting that training centres and universities in Nigeria, by extension, in Africa, are engaged in teaching students with outdated curriculum which makes the students redundant and unfit to meet current job requirements in the labour market.
“Universities and your training centres, your government teaching programmes are trying to uplift the workforce, the students; you would want to prepare them adequately for the jobs but you are teaching them with an outdated curriculum which doesn’t have much bearing or relevance with the requirements of today’s employers,” he said.
“We are trying to solve that by making the resources, materials and contents available to Africans for free so we can grow African experts, knowledgeable people and professionals who can take the jobs that are out there so that we the companies in Africa don’t go out to bring in experts while we are saying there are no jobs in Africa. There are jobs in Africa but are being done by people that we are bringing in from India, from Dubai, from North America and Europe.
“I say to you categorically and to anybody who studies the market will understand this- Virtualisation is the foundation of businesses and this will continue for the next foreseeable future. Any type of discipline, any type of skills that you acquire in the IT industry, you are talking about AI, talking about machine learning, you are talking about genome sequencing, self-driving cars and all of these things are built upon the construct of virtualization. Cloud computing is virtualisation at a global scale, and everybody even including your taxi driver will tell you one or two things about the cloud. There is no cloud without virtualization. Nobody does business the old ways again.
“The motto of Virtualise Africa is ‘helping Africans to virtualise Africa’. We can do it if we make the resources accessible to Africans. That is the whole premise of these corporate social responsibility and we are doing this in partnership with not just the universities but also private training centres and especially the Africa Union. We are the technology partner for the African initiative Pan African University and Pan African E-university. We are the technology driving those constructs and we are the ones facilitating their ability to actually make this a reality.
“The goal for them is to make education accessible to everybody within the fifty-five countries of Africa. Wherever they are, you can stay at home or anywhere, the resources are accessible wherever you are. The whole point of this is to make sure that what Africans need to be able to take up the jobs that are out there today, and the jobs are going to be there for a long time, virtualization and cloud are not going anywhere; everything you build today will be built upon them. When you have a solid background, you position yourself to be much more employable. Even if you don’t want to get employed by somebody, you become an entrepreneur,” he concluded.
Also lending credence to Deji Akomolafe’s perspective, Professor Funsho Falade, the president of Africa Engineering Education Association, Faculty of Engineering, University of Lagos, said engineers have the skills to analyze and proffer appropriate solutions using scientific ideas.
“Engineering, by its nature, is supposed to use scientific ideas to develop technology and therefore any nation that fails to develop its engineering, has failed to develop hydrogenous technology, and without hydrogenous technology, no nation can develop. So we continue to rely on imported technology which is very expensive and more often than not, unavoidable”.
Speaking further, Prof. Falade said “there is no shortcut to this. There is a need for the nation to invest in engineering education to develop its own infrastructure. If you look around us, our entire infrastructure is down because we rely on foreigners and what is more, those that are trained locally have low patronages from government.
“You have to challenge your engineers to develop and implement what they have to do in the country otherwise, our infrastructure will continually be in the hands of foreigners whether we like it or not. Nigeria has to develop Nigerians, by relying on foreigners; we are just wasting our time because, on our own, we must develop our potentials to deal with challenges on certain matters”.
He said the situation is that the practical application is just not there.
“So, what we need to do, indeed our curriculum needs to be reviewed in terms of content. We talk about STEM, that is: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But these components give hard skills. People are now talking about STEAM that is: science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. The arts components provide the necessary soft skills that we need to work and what is more now to bring the captains of industry to be part of the curriculum, in my university here, what we have done is to establish what we call Industry Advisory Board for the faculty.
“The membership of that board comprises engineering and non-engineering personnel and they are looking at the curriculum holistically trying to embed what they believe constitute the gap between what the industry needs and what is being taught at the university. For us to have formidable curricula there must be a partnership between the academia and the industry. The town and gown must come together,” he said.
Other resource persons at the conference include: Prof. David Goldberg, from Michigan, USA, Prof. Oyewusi Ibidapo-Obe, former Vice-Chancellor, University of Lagos, Prof. Sheryl Sorby, from USA, the chief host and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Prof. Oluwatoyin T.Ogundipe, students, experts and stakeholders too numerous to mention.