A big garnishing of the Carnegie Mellon University Rwanda graduation ceremony 2016 was the announcement of yet another milestone: the MasterCard Foundation Scholarship Programme for engineering students in Africa. 

This is valued at $10.8 million over seven years, benefitting 125 engineering students across the continent.

As we say in this part of the world, asanteni sana to Carnegie Mellon University and MasterCard Foundation.

This initiative is both a reminder and a challenge to the corporate world in Rwanda, East Africa and Africa, to play our right role in the development of manpower on the continent.

We are in rapidly changing times of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The world is entering an era whose developments we cannot afford to ignore nor wait to receive what has been researched, innovated and developed elsewhere. And one key area that requires a planned, focused, deliberate effort from all of us is human capital development.

The rich resources of Africa that we daily chest-thumb about will suffer the same fate as in the earlier decades, unless we develop the right skill-mix to exploit them to our benefit. We run the risk of earning peanuts from raw materials, while our young energies drown in the Mediterranean struggling to reach ‘their dreams’ in Europe. Yet we are doing nothing beyond occasional lamentations in conferences, seminars, workshops, radio/television/social media, as we witnessed the AU Commissioner in a pre-AU Summit Dialogue with the youth in Kigali, a few days back.

The Carnegie Mellon University and MasterCard Foundation scholarship programme announcement actually comes sandwiched between key events in Kigali where our role in our destiny is on trial.

The week earlier, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) had ended its meeting in Kigali, with the emerging issue being that agricultural research and scientific research in Africa remains at the mercy of foreign financiers.

In a few weeks coming, the entire political and technocrat leadership of Africa will converge in Kigali for the AU Summit. Besides ‘Agenda 2063’ whose speech content can be predicted to a very high level of confidence by any keen follower of matters Africa during such high level meetings, we have come to expect nothing beyond the usual colourful pomp.

For the African Union to live to her billing, the sitting of the Summit in Rwanda should be a turning point. A turning point where the success story of the country should literally rub onto all the collective leadership of the continent and ‘infect’ it with a new thinking.

Actually one friend I chatted with after the Carnegie Mellon-MasterCard foundation media roundtable, was of the view that our leaders coming for the AU Summit in Kigali need to have a session in rural Rwanda, in a village like Maraba, where we have the potential to export a kilo of coffee at $42 to the global markets; and another session across the border in Masisi, DR Congo, to witness the reality of the legend that Africa, at creation, was entrusted with wealth to manage it for the rest of humanity.

A clarion call to corporate Africa

True, we appreciate that there are big initiatives out there by various corporate entities across Africa, advancing such noble causes as the one The MasterCard Foundation launched here in Kigali, but we need more. We need more because the urgency of transforming Africa gets ever closer with each passing day.

And we cannot afford to delegate it to foreign partners. What if, for example, all commercial banks were to dedicate only 10% of their ATM transaction charges to a cause as The MasterCard Foundation’s?

How many graduates would we churn out annually with such a scheme? We have the resources, right from the road-side maize seller to the blue-chip corporates. What is lacking, according to one agricultural specialist from Uganda who was here for the FARA conference, is a structured mechanism to mobilise and allocate resources.

To illustrate his argument, he gave us an interesting scenario: one district in western Uganda ‘exports’ 40,000 bunches of matooke daily to Kampala. Levying an agricultural development tax of Ug shiiling 500 (Frw120) per bunch would yield an annual income of USD 2.2 million.

At an investment of USD86,000 per engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University, one district in one country would be able to send 25 students per intake. Simply through a farmgate levy that neither the farmer nor the trader feels has a burden on their income.

And this is one crop. This is one district, in one country. Extrapolate that to five crops in one district, five crops in 50 districts, five crops in 50 districts in five countries…!

Therein lies the secret to Africa’s transformation: the power of numbers. Our destiny lies squarely on our shoulders.