Editor, RE: “Northern Corridor implementation missing two key ingredients” (The New Times, December 15). In my view, the key public investment needed to reach this goal is, first and foremost, in training Africans at high level of knowledge generation and knowledge application. The truly basic need in innovation is that of highly competent product and service developers. And we, in Africa and East Africa in particular, are not yet endowed with such a group of professionals. Indeed, vocational and technical training is also badly needed. But this sector ought not to be the priority at this particular moment in our “development” drive. In Rwanda, for instance, with a recent focus and massive investment in this kind of training, I am afraid we’ll soon be swamped with only a large group of artisans and technicians, luckily few among them creating their employment, but the large majority are solely tinkering, copying, or toiling in nascent and foreign invested and foreign led factories. If the immediate goal is to create ‘jobs outside the agriculture sector’, maybe this goal will be somehow attained. But, obviously, for such a needed true overall, genuine, indigenous and endogenous development, innovations in any of the four key levels of an African and/or East African industrialisation will never be generated by graduates from TVET schools. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga
