One of the biggest businesses in East Africa these days is conferences, summits, dialogues or whatever you may choose to call them. There is a whole industry built around these conferences that feeds airlines, travel agents, hotels accommodation and meals, translation services, decorators, public address systems, transportation of delegates and so much more.

The industry is so huge that governments have now invested in it and play a leading role in promoting it. Kigali was missing out but last year it got Kigali Convention Centre and two big name hotels added to the industry to ease pressure on the ones that existed before. Some of the conferences are so huge that they are actually an inconvenience to city dwellers with many of the roads closed to make life easy for the visitors.

The big conferences are often the ones of a continental or global scale like African Union summits, World Economic Forums, or to do with say China - Africa issues or Japan - Africa issues. For such summit we go all the way out to ensure the conference is successfully organised. The visitors are also seen as potential tourists so we have to really be on our best behaviour and also show off our amazing culture to win their hearts and possibly wallets.

I have attended some of the conferences and watched many others from a distance (when you don’t get that badge to get in you stay away). The topics are often the broad ones on how Africa can catch up with the rest of the world in terms of technology, climate change, agriculture, tourism, trade and industrialisation. The conversations are often interesting and insightful and can be referred to for years thereafter. Some resolutions end up even carrying the name of the town that hosted the event.

Of late there has been a lot of what I would call noise regarding education in the region. In Uganda the closure of Makerere University sparked a lot of talk regarding the future of the region’s oldest university given that strikes at Makerere are now only surprising if they take long to happen. Then there was the issue of Busoga University and its 1000 fake degrees to South Sudanese students.

By now we are almost used to the stories of politicians in Uganda and Kenya going back and forth in court to prove that they actually do possess the right academic qualifications to occupy the offices they hold. There was a time when there was a mad rush for East Africans to Uganda to get a degree from almost any university that takes cash as a payment. Today the rush is in creating universities at almost every corner.

When a new education administration in Kenya resulted in the taming of cheating and a sharp decline in students scoring straight As, another conversation began about which schools actually teach and which ones just prepare students for exams. The poor performance of boys at the top even brought up talk about the need to emancipate the boy child.

There was also some uproar when it was reported in Uganda that some practical subjects were to be scrapped from the curriculum to be taught only in vocational schools. A few years back when the idea of the revived East African Community was still fresh topic, it was common to land on stories about harmonising education in the East African region. It appears the only thing being harmonised is education for the rich.

Almost in every East African nation, you will find public education and then education for the rich that seems to follow the same curriculum because after all it is the international curriculum (Cambridge and others in the same category). It is even easy for a child on this curriculum to move from a private school in Kigali to one in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam without much trouble.

Is it not time we sat down as a region and talked about the kind of education that can take us forward. And by this I mean most of us not just those who can afford to keep away from the public education that is largely offered just to have great quantitative statistics to throw around.

Can we sit and talk about the kind of education that harnesses natural sports talents, arts and makes us generally competent and competitive in this age? Education is no longer a mere basic right but a strategic developmental concern in this era of globalisation. What is our game plan as East Africa?