adminGibson Mandishona
This article echoes the one by Professor Christopher Chetsanga “Crying Out for an Industrialised Economy” that recently appeared in The Herald.
Science and Technology and Research and Development are often used interchangeably. Industrialisation and science and technology are synonymous in that one feeds into the other and conversely.
Research and development programmes feed into industrialisation, which in turn can be made to finance and nurture science and technology initiatives. These phenomena do not just happen in a vacuum, but occur in a series of steps or “processes” or “stories”, which are underpinned by a number of (inter) dependent events.
Dr Noah Pashapa once remarked: “African cultures have not been static: they are man’s response to the environment (agriculture, technology, arts); relational modes (laws, customs, institutions); existential modes (philosophy, religion, language); and identifiable patterns (communalism, spiritual world-view)”.
Hence, with respect to the science and technology sector there is an immediate need to develop discursive and institutional settings for reflective technological advances geared to the needs of Zimbabwe.
Science and technology innovation can be broadly defined as an act of doing new things; or doing old things in new ways.
It spans all aspects of human effort — in the physical/life sciences and social perspectives.
Plato once argued that reality is embedded in abstract entities called forms or ideas which fuse to form innovation. The significance of his world view is on the notion of idea or form which is the basis of man’s technological unfolding.
Indeed, as some scholar noted, the basis of science and technology is underpinned by five steps set out in the acronym IDEAL:
Identify problem/idea
Define problem/idea
Explore strategies/techniques
Act on strategies/techniques
Look back — revise — refine — restart
No single recipe exists for building (research and development) capacity necessary for science and technology development: it can be product-led (about 50 percent), process-led (about 30 percent) or combined product-process led (about 20 percent). These percentages are world averages.
Science and technology determinants have both demand-side (competition, factor inputs, prices) and supply-side factors ( infrastructure, finance, motivation/profit, communications).
There is need to develop new and explanatory science and technology indicators, crucial for formulating and implementing relevant policies (global trends, identifying essential sectors for investment, number of scientists engaged in research and development, number of institutions engaged in research and development.
The AU recommendation of allocating 1 percent of GDP to research and development activities has only been accessed by South Africa. The Zimbabwe budgetary allocation for research and development is less than 0,1 percent. To address these issues, Nepad has recently constituted an expert group to develop science and technology indicators and hence to establish an African Observatory which will contain country profiles.
Indicators for science and technology sustainability should constitute a yardstick which measures both life cycle assessment and ecological footprints.
There is need to democratise the uptake of science and technology which requires a bottom-up approach, constituting participatory interplay of beneficiaries, Government and industrial establishments.
A new space is required for social and re-appropriation of knowledge structures to produce a self-sustainable society with new forms of production and consumption. The social construction will hence take place at the stage of research and at a redeveloped stage by application engineers, scientists and beneficiaries.
Thus science and technology watchwords subsume appropriate design, user involvement, capacity building and grassroots participation; above all, a re-orientation of the mindset of the research and development personnel.
It must be acknowledged that indigenous and global knowledge platforms must constitute a formidable repository of science and technology database.
Democratisation of science and technology is thus about finding new ways of privileging those excluded from the technological mainstream and recognising them in new technical arrangements.
Women and youth are an essential ingredient to be successfully socialised and embedded into new structures, through multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity.
“Go to the people, Live with them, Learn from them”, once said Confucius.
Moving towards a wholesome definition, the ideal science and technology resource should encompass general impact (on human living standards); efficiency (environmental, social impacts); and simplicity (user friendly).
It may therefore be inferred that technological development can be conceived in three stages:
Introduction of new science and technology scenarios
Incremental improvement to existing techniques or upgrading of traditional processes. Post-war Japan spent $7 billion during 1960-79, buying the best technologies from Europe and US, and a further $50 billion on incremental research and development.
Generation of innovative strategies, eg industrial clustering, whereby small businesses unite into a single sector under some common or digital infrastructure typified by Silicon Valley. Here entrepreneurs with innovative concepts and venture capital came together offering ICT and allied services.
Science and technology is not about re-inventing the wheel, it is about leap-frogging, the need to integrate the positive aspects of current technological trends with those of indigenous knowledge and innovation.
National centres of excellence can be established to act as virtual institutions encompassing networks of scientists working on joint programmes. In this instance home-grown science and technology becomes the key component to transform Zimbabwe into a knowledge-driven economy.
Lessons abound on science and technology development success stories in several countries. These seem to focus on:
Establishment of centres of excellence (policy and incentives)
Linkages creation (government —universities — industry)
Value addition on natural resources
International networks
Outreach programmes to communities
Attracting diaspora researchers
A recent report of the Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences (ZAS) noted that the scarcity of PhD scholars in the physical and life sciences translates into an intellectual poverty and zero contribution to innovation and research and development.
Zimbabwe’s strongest and anchor asset should be its human resource base. ZAS is an umbrella forum of the country’s academics, comprising of three colleges: physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences. Currently it runs without any budgetary allocation from Government, a matter requiring attention of policy makers.
However, the slow pace of science and technology development is raising the profile of employment creation and the time bomb embedded in the burgeoning number of unemployed youth coming into the job market.
It is gratifying to note that the Zimbabwean Government has crafted a new Science and Technology Policy with 53 sub-policies, which contain activities and mechanisms for evaluating progress. There is need to capitalise the programme fully to enable the country to fulfil its long term mandate.
The second such policy was launched by President Mugabe on June 13, 2012, with the watchwords: “ Science and technology, being cross-cutting and pervasive, must of necessity, harmonise with polices in areas of energy, industry, health, agriculture, education and defence.”
Gibson Mandishona writes in a personal capacity, on science-energy issues. [email protected]
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