daniel chigunwe
Zimbabwe has built up a reasonable industrial, mining and agricultural base for its economy, and these are growing fast, while the number of quality scientists able to do first class research has been dramatically expanded: the next step must be to put the two together.
President Mnangagwa at this week’s National Research, Science, Technology and Innovation Conference stressed the need for a double approach, that scientists would be seeking practical solutions to grow Zimbabwean economic activity while the business sectors would see the research community, largely centred on universities, as a source of solutions by commissioning the research they needed.
To an extent this has been going on for some time at a fairly high level in some areas, such as agriculture, and at a fairly low level in others, such as industry.
The most obvious reason for far better connexions between farmers and research than in other sectors is that farming is so dependent on the soils, climate, and the like where the combination is largely unique to Zimbabwe.
Even solutions found in similar climatic zones usually require tweaking to work in Zimbabwe, and generally while research in other countries can give a lot of pointers, the main hard grind has to be done in Zimbabwe.
So one problem the President highlighted, the feeling that something done in foreign land must be better than something done in Zimbabwe, has less traction in the agricultural sector.
Even if there is a ready-made solution, so Zimbabwe does not have to reinvent the wheel as the President put it, that same solution needs to be adjusted for climatic and other natural variations.
And vary often even that adjustment will require some highly innovative work that will lead to other benefits.
So in the agricultural sectors there is a continual flow of requests for better solutions and the delivery of these better solutions by researchers.
A fair number of the researchers work for Government, mainly on the application side, but they keep close contact with the universities. Even more important an agricultural research scientist is likely to be moving between posts in Government, universities and the private sector during their working life so just about everyone in that research community knows what is being done and where.
This dynamic linking of research and farmers has proved time and again to be a driver of Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector and is probably the best example of what the President wants to see elsewhere.
Of course there is always room for improvement, especially in the design of suitable equipment and processes for on-farm processing.
Mining has some contact and there is contact between university academics and the mining community, as well a general research on mining in Zimbabwe. Several decades ago the University of Zimbabwe set up its Institute of Mining Research to further these contacts.
Some of the research is open, meaning that the results can be published for a general audience, but some is for a specific problem faced by a particular miner who pays for the research and can, at least for a period, have exclusive use of the results.
The research is not just in geology or mining. Very often other academic specialities have to be brought in. For example when there was a great deal of research being done on stabilising mine dumps and converting them back to pasture or least natural bush, soil scientists, agronomists, and botanists were consulted.
The object of that research was not just to end the dangers of mine dumps or even just to make them environmentally friendly, it was also to do this in the most cost effective way so that miners would embrace the solutions as something practical, rather than the result of academics sitting in ivory towers.
The odd industrialist has made contact with a university now and again, but there is less flow between manufacturers and the research community than in other sectors and here there would be huge advantages if industry caught up.
The recent creation of innovation centres at universities and colleges was largely to direct these into practical research and applications, and to create businesses. But there is a very positive side-effect that it familiarises a far larger group of university researchers with industrial and business operations.
Engineers largely automatically had this background, since you cannot become a full member of an institution of engineers, including the Zimbabwe Institution of Engineers, until you have passed some post-graduate practical experience in an engineering environment under supervision.
But others may have missed out on connecting their academic specialities with the business world.
Sometimes the research can be just on one point. Many years ago a major industry had problems with blemishes on high-end spray painting. They contacted a chemistry lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe who came down and took a sample away.
A week later a botany lecturer turned up with the sample, and said the blemishes were from minute pollen, identifying the tree responsible. A quick walk around the grounds found the tree and it was replaced by another species.
Very recently another industrialist could not find any foreign machine to do what they needed it to do.
So they went to the Harare Institute of Technology, who designed and built what was needed. There must be many more of these one-off examples.
But there will also be need for industrial research into processes, sometimes creating new processes, sometimes working out better ways of running a process, sometimes figuring out how to use particular local raw materials, or even the “waste” from some raw material, more productively.
This is where the contact between industry and the research world will yield its greatest gains.
Online Reporter