Empowering Africa’s Subsequent Era Engineers With IEEE

I get numerous e mail from individuals asking to contribute to IEEE Spectrum. Often, they need to write an article for us. However one daring question I acquired in January 2024 went a lot additional: An undergraduate engineering pupil named Oluwatosin Kolade, from Obafemi Awolowo College, in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, volunteered to be our robotics editor.

Kolade—Tosin to his associates—had been the publication editor for his IEEE pupil department, however he’d by no means revealed an article professionally. His earnestness and enthusiasm had been endearing. I defined that we have already got a robotics editor, however I’d be glad to work with him on writing, modifying, and finally publishing an article.

Again in 2003, I had met loads of engineering college students once I traveled to Nigeria to report on the SAT-3/WASC cable, the primary undersea fiber-optic cable to land in West Africa. I bear in mind seeing college students gathering round out of date PCs at Web cafés linked to the world through a satellite tv for pc dish powered by a generator. I challenged Tosin to inform Spectrum readers what it’s like for engineering college students at present. The result’s “Classes from a Janky Drone.”

I made a decision to enrich Tosin’s piece with the attitude of a extra established engineer in sub-Saharan Africa. I reached out to G. Pascal Zachary, who has lined engineering schooling in Africa for us, and Zachary launched me to Engineer Bainomugisha, a pc science professor at Makerere College, in Kampala, Uganda. In “Studying Extra With Much less,” Bainomugisha attracts out the issues that had been frequent to his and Tosin’s expertise and suggests methods to make the {hardware} crucial for engineering schooling extra accessible.

Actually, the area’s decades-long battle to develop its engineering expertise hinges on entry to the three issues we deal with on this problem: dependable electrical energy, ubiquitous broadband, and instructional sources for younger engineers.

“Throughout my weekly video calls with Tosin…the connection was fairly good— besides when it wasn’t.”

Zachary’s article on this problem, “What It Will Actually Take to Electrify All of Africa” tackles the primary subject, with a deal with an formidable initiative to carry electrical energy to an extra 300 million individuals by 2030.

Contributing editor Lucas Laursen’s article, “In Nigeria, Why Isn’t Broadband In all places?” investigates the gradual rollout of fiber-optic connectivity within the twenty years since my first go to. As he discovered when he traveled to Nigeria earlier this 12 months, the nation now has eight undersea cables delivering 380 terabits of capability, but lower than half of the inhabitants has broadband entry.

I acquired a way of Nigeria’s bandwidth points throughout my weekly video calls with Tosin to debate his article. The connection was fairly good, besides when it wasn’t. Nonetheless, I reminded myself, twenty years in the past such calls would have been almost inconceivable.

By means of these weekly chats, we established an expert connection, which made it that rather more significant once I acquired to fulfill Tosin in particular person this previous Could on the IEEE ICRA robotics convention, in Atlanta. Tosin was attending because of a scholarship from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Like a child in a sweet store, he kibbutzed with fellow scholarship winners, attended talks, checked out robots, and met the engineers who constructed them.

As Tosin embarks on the following leg in his profession journey, he’s supported by the IEEE group, which not solely acknowledges his promise however provides him entry to a community of execs who might help him and his cohort understand their potential.