At the ongoing Africa Innovation Summit taking place in Kigali, Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente announced that a National Research and Innovation Fund would be launched next week. This comes against a backdrop of African countries waking up to the need to keep up with the developed world by adopting technology and investing in education. But however much new technologies are adopted hardly has any have origins in Africa, it is simply a market. So, with the Prime Minister announcing the research and innovation fund, he was throwing the gauntlet at the private sector, but is it they to take up the challenge? All new technologies and innovations originate from private research institutions and universities and it costs money. Many universities depend on grants from the private sector to thrive. But sadly, the private sector on the continent is absent. Ghana’s first president and founding member of the Organisation of African Unity, Kwame Nkrumah, had banked too much on Africa’s possibilities and prospects. “We shall accumulate machinery and establish steel works, iron foundries and factories; we shall link the various states of our continent with communications; we shall astound the world with our hydroelectric power; we shall drain marshes and swamps, clear infested areas, feed the undernourished, and rid our people of parasites and disease. “It is within the possibility of science and technology to make even the Sahara bloom into a vast field with verdant vegetation for agricultural and industrial developments,” said the optimistic Nkrumah, during the launch of the Union. However, Africa failed to walk the talk. That dream seems to have dies with him just as the many “plans of action” drawn by the OAU and its successor, AU. It is, therefore, time for individual nations to come to the innovation table with something, not coming empty-handed, then, maybe, it will be easier to merge the ideas.
