The African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology (Amcost) meeting in Egypt in March took a decision to keep science at the forefront of the continent’s political agenda and to use Egypt’s successful programme to boost science and technology as a model.
The five-member ministerial bureau of Amcost, elected for the next two years now includes both Egypt and South Africa, arguably the continent’s two most powerful states, as chair and second cochair respectively.
Observers said this strong leadership could revive Amcost meetings, which have been characterised by poor attendance and a lack of political leadership.
‘The member countries are now getting to understand what it is all about,” said Umar Bindir, director general of Nigeria’s national office for technology acquisition and promotion and a former chartered engineer. ‘I think the future meetings of Amcost will be more challenging and more focused,” he said.
The meeting also endorsed South Africa’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array international radio telescope and agreed to set up a working group on space science to address the continent’s growing interest in the field.
But the draft resolution from the meeting urges member states to put more resources, including staff, into the African Union’s struggling department of human resources, science and technology.
Ahmed Hamdy, based at the AU directorate, said African countries needed to put money into continental programmes.
‘Several member states are waiting for someone to take the championship role,” said Hamdy, who is based in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. ‘We are hoping that soon we will be able to announce the availability of funding from Africa, into Africa.”
Linda Nordling, a former editor of Research Africa, is a science journalist based in Cape Town. Maha Ahmed is a journalist in Cairo. Ahmed Hamdy can be contacted on hamdya@africaunion.org. A longer version of this article is available on the sub-Saharan Africa pages of www.SciDev.Net