Engineering news
Africa has a problem. By 2050 its population is expected to have doubled and be increasingly urbanised. Experts believe some 85,000 new clinics, 310,000 new primary schools, and over 700 million new housing units need to be built on the continent, as well as the basic infrastructure to go with it.
There aren’t enough engineers, architects and designers in Africa to make this happen.
MASS, a design group based in Massachusetts in the US and in Kigali, Rwanda, has been building the African Design Centre (ADC) to help solve the skills shortage. The ADC opens it doors for the first time during the first week of September.
Christian Benimana, director of the African Design Centre (ADC) says the challenge is more complex than just a skills shortage. The majority of architects, designers and engineers in Africa study abroad, in places such as the UK, France, Russia and China. This creates a rich professional background but does not recreate a profession in their home country.
He says: “The problem is there is no framework for them to work within when they return from their studies. There is no common denominator in their home countries and that is translated in their training and development.”
In addition, when an African project manager has to work with an international network of designers, architects and engineers, the results are more easily swayed by the international nature of the network. This often results in designs that are that not best suited to the local community.
“This is not a problem in the developed world, but it is disastrous in Africa,” he says. “We decided we needed some serious investment in education and new creative minds on the continent.”
It was going to be difficult to get an initiative adopted throughout Africa by multiple governments, on the scale necessary to have the desired impact. MASS decided to take a different approach – to launch a single institution, the ADC, which will train designers, architects and engineers to work throughout the continent.
“We thought carefully about what we want to achieve in 50 years. Thousands more designers and engineers is great but it doesn’t solve the problem. They need an environment to operate within, an ethos and a clear mission - professional bodies and a way to steer policy and research.”
The main goal for the project is not to create a series of ADCs throughout Africa, but to spread its ideas and lessons throughout the continent through the people that it trains. Benimana likens the approach to “planting a seed and watching it grow into a forest.”
The ADC will take in post graduate designers, architects and engineers. Around 60 people applied for the initial intake of 10 starting this September from all over the world. Course content over two years will be a mix of workshops, lectures and “on the ground” project work in local communities. “They have to be exposed to a wide range of topics outside of their particular competencies and develop their soft skills.”
As part of the course, each Fellow will also receive a ThinkPad P50 mobile workstation, running the Autodesk Suite, to complete their coursework, both in the field and in the classroom.
The ADC is being funded by charitable donations but Benimana says it is planning to be self-funding after five years. At that point, MASS will have created a self-sufficient institution with the aim of solving African design and engineering problems, in Africa.