Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 4 | Linking African Universities with MIT iLabs, page 2

Two weeks after they’d arrived, the visitors had left for Ile-Ife to “take back home” the lessons learned in Cambridge. Ayodele, with a particular interest in iLab design, aimed to help create several new online electrical engineering labs at OAU. Akinwunmi, who focused on pedagogical applications of the MIT lab, planned to support its integration into various OAU classes. He has also been involved in producing a comprehensive package of documentation for teachers and lab users.

More recently, two MIT graduate students, 26-year-old Piotr Mitros, from Poland, and 23-year-old Samuel Gikandi, from Kenya, took off for Nigeria in the second phase of the student exchange. Mitros, who previously worked on Internet technology projects in China, is fascinated by the possibility of helping Africa modernize in “a different way than the U.S. We’ll be starting with a clean slate,” he says, “and I’d like to see if we can do things better.” One improvement he is taking along to OAU is the “Mini,” a scaled-down version of a microelectronics iLab (which costs upward of $100,000 to build) that, remarkably, can be assembled for $40. “The Mini is much less sensitive, but the theory is the same,” he says, “and because it’s so cheap, many more students would be able to get access to the experiment.” Gikandi has traveled to Ghana to help run a programming course for high school and college students, and he considers the iLab exchange a good way to “stay in touch with Africa.” The students’ to-do list is a long one, and includes a number of complex and critical tasks: assessing the capacity of the Internet at OAU; determining the skill level and training needs of the engineering students; building relationships with the OAU Information and Communications Technology (ICT) team; determining how well the MIT iLabs meet the needs of African institutions—and looking for ways to change what isn’t working.

In Nigeria, the MIT students are overseen by del Alamo’s opposite number, electronic engineering professor Kunle Kehinde, who, in addition to coordinating the launch of the African iLabs, heads OAU’s Information Technology and Communications Unit (INTECU). Kehinde welcomes the opportunity for his students to access new experimentation techniques and learn about new hardware and software. He sees OAU as an ideal start-up location because “the university prides itself in being the best…and has a history of trying to stay on top in many fields. For example, the Nigerian Universities Commission last year judged OAU the number-one research university in Nigeria. OAU is also generally accepted as number one in ICT, and has staff and students who are highly motivated to achieve. OAU has more than the critical mass of staff with good knowledge of instrumentation, software and computation, having undergone training within and outside the country.”

Kehinde, like del Alamo, believes student exchange is key: “Rubbing minds together brings out better results,” he believes, and “the cross-cultural aspect is also of great value.” An international mindset is a must for anyone in the tech sector, del Alamo feels, or, for that matter, any educated person in the 21st century. “Engineering has become a global endeavor,” he stresses. “MIT is working hard to provide international internship opportunities for our students around the world. MISTI [the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative] routinely sends students to Japan, China, Mexico and Western Europe. Before the iLab-Africa project was launched, the opportunities for MIT students to work and do research in Africa were very limited. Our project in some way represents a beachhead in Africa. We hope that as we establish contacts and build relationships, we will be able to broaden the range of opportunities there. We also hope to expand the opportunities for African students and teaching staff to work on projects at MIT.”

As products of cross-cultural exchange themselves, both Kehinde and del Alamo make a strong case for its payoffs. Born in Spain, del Alamo attended college in Madrid, did his doctoral work in California at Stanford University, then worked in the telecommunications industry in Japan for several years. He came to MIT as a junior professor in 1988 and has been there ever since. Kehinde enrolled in OAU as a student in 1968 and several years later was employed as a graduate assistant. Through the years, he took leaves to do further graduate work in various engineering fields in other countries, attending the University of Sussex, in Brighton, England, to study control engineering and completing his postdoctoral work in nuclear instrumentation at the University of California, Berkeley.

These two globally aware engineers know well the level of technology required for countries to compete in today’s marketplace, and they believe iLab’s potential to boost Africa’s tech sector can’t be overstated. Asked what the project might mean for OAU, Kehinde quickly ticked off the following benefits: “A new lease on life for performing relevant experiments on state-of-the-art instrumentation over the Internet; getting access to real-life experimental set-ups online, where cost would otherwise have prohibited availability; creating an avenue for training of African staff in technical, software, hardware and curriculum development; and, importantly, creating an atmosphere for collaboration among staff of MIT and African universities in the first instance, and among staff in African universities in the second instance.”

Del Alamo confirms that iLabs’ are “an avenue for a deeper collaboration between the participating institutions that can go beyond its formal scope.” Yet although he’s optimistic, he sees some weak spots, too. “The greatest risk we face,” he warns, “is that the project might not be a good fit, meaning it might not actually enrich progress in Africa. Building and maintaining new labs, as our Nigerian partners plan to do, could prove too hard or too costly. The local culture could simply override the requirements of the project. At the end of the day,” he points out, “transforming education in Africa is not about us, it’s about them.” This observation sums up what’s really at stake for iLabs and other ambitious projects aimed at improving the developing world and clearly illustrates the promise, and the pitfalls, of international technology transfer—the movement of critical knowledge between countries.

Next page: It’s accepted wisdom that the developing world, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, desperately needs to bridge the digital divide in order to stimulate economic growth, eradicate poverty and boost living standards.

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