Empowering Africa’s Next Generation Engineers With IEEE

I get a lot of email from people asking to contribute to IEEE Spectrum. Usually, they want to write an article for us. But one bold query I received in January 2024 went much further: An undergraduate engineering student named Oluwatosin Kolade, from Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, volunteered to be our robotics editor.

Kolade—Tosin to his friends—had been the newsletter editor for his IEEE student branch, but he’d never published an article professionally. His earnestness and enthusiasm were endearing. I explained that we already have a robotics editor, but I’d be glad to work with him on writing, editing, and ultimately publishing an article.

Back in 2003, I had met plenty of engineering students when I traveled to Nigeria to report on the SAT-3/WASC cable, the first undersea fiber-optic cable to land in West Africa. I remember seeing students gathering around obsolete PCs at Internet cafés connected to the world via a satellite dish powered by a generator. I challenged Tosin to tell Spectrum readers what it’s like for engineering students today. The result is “Lessons from a Janky Drone.”

I decided to complement Tosin’s piece with the perspective of a more established engineer in sub-Saharan Africa. I reached out to G. Pascal Zachary, who has covered engineering education in Africa for us, and Zachary introduced me to Engineer Bainomugisha, a computer science professor at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda. In “Learning More With Less,” Bainomugisha draws out the things that were common to his and Tosin’s experience and suggests ways to make the hardware necessary for engineering education more accessible.

In fact, the region’s decades-long struggle to develop its engineering talent hinges on access to the three things we focus on in this issue: reliable electricity, ubiquitous broadband, and educational resources for young engineers.

“During my weekly video calls with Tosin…the connection was pretty good— except when it wasn’t.”

Zachary’s article in this issue, “What It Will Really Take to Electrify All of Africa” tackles the first topic, with a focus on an ambitious initiative to bring electricity to an additional 300 million people by 2030.

Contributing editor Lucas Laursen’s article, “In Nigeria, Why Isn’t Broadband Everywhere?” investigates the slow rollout of fiber-optic connectivity in the two decades since my first visit. As he learned when he traveled to Nigeria earlier this year, the country now has eight undersea cables delivering 380 terabits of capacity, yet less than half of the population has broadband access.

I got a sense of Nigeria’s bandwidth issues during my weekly video calls with Tosin to discuss his article. The connection was pretty good, except when it wasn’t. Still, I reminded myself, two decades ago such calls would have been nearly impossible.

Through those weekly chats, we established a professional connection, which made it that much more meaningful when I got to meet Tosin in person this past May at the IEEE ICRA robotics conference, in Atlanta. Tosin was attending thanks to a scholarship from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Like a kid in a candy shop, he kibbutzed with fellow scholarship winners, attended talks, checked out robots, and met the engineers who built them.

As Tosin embarks on the next leg in his career journey, he is supported by the IEEE community, which not only recognizes his promise but gives him access to a network of professionals who can help him and his cohort realize their potential.