Are institutions like Ashesi,AIMs ,ALU, Songhai and others addressing this challenge? Jehuti Nefekare writes:
The present educational system in Africa is a direct clone or sometimes a derivative of the colonial educational system imposed by the European adventurers who forcibly imposed themselves on our shoresContinuing...
Acceptance into a foreign institution that offers these courses is construed by our young African friends as a metric of his academic brilliance, a validation and an acknowledgement by foreigners particularly westerners of having joined the elite western club. Failure to obtain admission into such institutions undermines the self-confidence of our young African who now believe that he is not brilliant and is incapable of self-acquisition of knowledge. For our young African, since Harvard, MIT, or Caltech did not admit me to study aerospace engineering or nuclear physics, it means those fields are closed to me. I must eat humble pie and give up on my dreams.More here
What does such a situation do to our development goals and aspirations? This means that educational institutions in the west are a control valve that determine if we obtain expertise in any field, which is vital to our industrial and technological development. They therefore determine if and when we can obtain those skills to develop our own industrial and technological base.