STISA-2024: Another Opportunity for Africa’s Transformation

Photo Courtesy of Ollivier Girard for the Center for International Forestry Research via Flickr.

In Africa today there are more opportunities than ever before for economic transformation and sustainable development. For the past fifteen years, Africa has experienced phenomenal economic growth; as of 2014, the continent was home to nine of the fastest twenty growing economies in the world. This growth is due to many factors, including:

(1) Increased political stability and democratization in many African countries;

(2) An improved business environment, which has led to increased foreign direct investment;

(3) A growing private sector with a diverse range of industrial firms engaged in various economic activities;

(4) Renewed focus on accelerating regional economic and political integration.

The challenge, now, is how to sustain this impressive growth and spread its benefits. The answer lies in massive investment in science, technology, and innovation (STI).

The Role of STISA-2024 in Furthering STI

Investment in STI will further accelerate the development of technologies that can address Africa's enormous challenges in areas such as health, agriculture, security, and unemployment. STI offers Africa the opportunity to build the capacity to solve its own problems.

Realizing the need to optimize the benefits of STI for inclusive growth and sustainable development, the AU and thus the member countries adopted the Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA-2024) in 2014. Its mission is to "accelerate [the] transition of Africa to a knowledge led, innovation based economy." The strategy seeks to deploy STI to address six key challenges: building infrastructure, eliminating hunger, improving human development, protecting the environment, enhancing social cohesion, and spreading prosperity. STISA-2024 also identified four strategic actions that reflect the continent's state of development while accommodating differences among states. These include investing in infrastructure development, building human competence, incubating and growing enterprises, and providing an enabling environment for innovation.

STISA-2024 recognizes that increased knowledge is the basis of economic transformation and sustainable development. Many African leaders recognize that their countries' transitions into modern economies will require considerable investment in developing knowledge and opportunities for innovation. This prolonged strategy offers African countries a unique opportunity to develop their infrastructure, build human capacity, and stimulate entrepreneurial development. African countries can chart a new development path that takes advantage of emerging technologies, especially in areas of renewable energy, telecommunications, and genetic engineering, in order to develop homegrown solutions to the enormous challenges the continent faces.

Maximizing STISA-2024 at the National Level

The implementation of policies and strategies is one of the main challenges confronting African countries. For STISA-2024 to achieve its mission and have a significant impact, African governments must be committed to the implementation of the strategy. Crosscutting STI policies should be integrated into overall development policies, including those for economic, finance, labor, agriculture, and industrial development. STI issues should move from the periphery to the center of the development policy process and pervade all relevant policy areas.

African leaders must be committed to funding STISA-2024's work.  Building STI capacity requires countries to invest in education, research, and development. Human capital, in the form of sufficient numbers of suitably educated and high qualified people, is essential to the achievement of STISA-2024's strategic objectives. African countries must build their own educational system to reflect present day societal needs. They must build efficient and compulsory primary and secondary school education programs, while stimulating interest in STI from an early stage. STISA-2024 offers a platform for African countries to invest in its universities and other research institutions, particularly those with the capacity to develop technologies and innovations that can be used to drive national economies and address developmental challenges. Higher education and training must be of a better quality and diversified, as well as oriented towards the acquisition of knowledge, reinforcement of critical skills, and the utilization of scientific and technological know-how. The higher education system, together with key research institutes, is the engine room of the system of innovation. As such, it should be developed as the focal point for learning, scholarship, and research.

The strategies pursued by the AU member states should also be inclusive. If STISA-2024 is designed to transform Africa's economy, then it must involve all active players in the economy. The informal sector accounts for 80% of the jobs created on the continent, and therefore its members must be involved in decision-making and strategy implementation processes. The numerous inventions, innovations, and indigenous knowledge in the informal sector must be harnessed and maximized to achieve the objectives of STISA-2024. This can be done by recognizing the informal sector as a contributor to the pool of knowledge in many of the same ways as the formal economy. There should be close collaboration among scholars, practitioners, and lay experts to achieve the objectives of STISA-2024.The publicity and discussion of STISA-2024 should include actors from the government and formal research circles to town halls and villages, where farmers and rural women can contribute and be part of the implementation process. The strategy by now should be in its second phase of implementation, "Phase 2: 2015-2017: Development and Implementation of the First Set of Flagship Programs." Unfortunately, this phase is still unknown to most Africans except those in government, research organizations, and universities. This indicates that more work needs to be done to include mid- and lower-level actors.

Conclusion

STISA-2024 offers African countries the opportunity to leverage the continent's recent economic growth by channeling a new developmental path to transform African countries from natural resource-based economies to viable industrial giants. The goal is for these countries to compete in a world already driven by knowledge and innovation. However, the top-down approach where government, universities, and research institutions occupy the center circle and both the formal and informal private sectors occupy the periphery is not working. The African Union and national governments should urgently adopt a cross-sector approach, which involves the inclusion of all major players in the implementation process of STISA-2024. The people of Africa should be given the opportunity to participate in Africa's transition to a knowledge-led and innovation-based economy.