Empowering Africa’s Subsequent Era Engineers With IEEE

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

Kolade—Tosin to his pals—had been the publication editor for his IEEE scholar 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 in the end publishing an article.

Again in 2003, I had met loads of engineering college students after I traveled to Nigeria to report on the SAT-3/WASC cable, the primary undersea fiber-optic cable to land in West Africa. I keep in mind seeing college students gathering round out of date PCs at Web cafés related to the world by way of a satellite tv for pc dish powered by a generator.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 this time. The result’s “Classes from a Janky Drone.”

I made a decision to enhance Tosin’s piece with the angle 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 widespread to his and Tosin’s expertise and suggests methods to make the {hardware} crucial for engineering schooling extra accessible.

In reality, the area’s decades-long battle to develop its engineering expertise hinges on entry to the three issues we deal with on this challenge: dependable electrical energy, ubiquitous broadband, and academic assets 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 challenge, “What It Will Actually Take to Electrify All of Africa” tackles the primary matter, with a deal with an bold initiative to convey electrical energy to an extra 300 million individuals by 2030.

Contributing editor Lucas Laursen’s article, “In Nigeria, Why Isn’t Broadband All over the place?” investigates the sluggish rollout of fiber-optic connectivity within the 20 years since my first go to. As he discovered when he traveled to Nigeria earlier this yr, 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, 20 years in the past such calls would have been almost inconceivable.

By these weekly chats, we established knowledgeable connection, which made it that rather more significant after I acquired to fulfill Tosin in particular person this previous Might 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 neighborhood, which not solely acknowledges his promise however offers him entry to a community of execs who will help him and his cohort notice their potential.