Employment and knowledge ecomnomy remain to be Africa’s dev’t challenges

By Simegnish Yekoye

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Africa stands to lose its highly skilled workforce through brain-drain to countries that are already advanced in their knowledge industries and always looking for more and more skilled labor at a relatively cheaper cost, said Abdoulie Janneh, executive secretary for Economic Commission for Africa, ECA.

“There is a critical mass of African knowledge workers in the Diaspora and the continent continues to suffer from brain drain,” Janneh emphasized.
Janneh made the comments earlier this week during a four days long meeting on development information opened here in Addis Ababa with a call to tap into the emerging knowledge economy to tackle employment challenges in Africa.

“Without examining and addressing the expertise and skills base that exist in Africa, the continent will not be able to take advantage of the benefits of the knowledge economy”, he added.
During this fifth Committee on Development Information (CODI) meeting which has been assessing the status of the knowledge economy in Africa Janneh stressed out if the trend of brain drain persists, Africa could be disadvantaged, aggravating unemployment problems and reducing the human resources capacity to support its homegrown and meaningful knowledge enterprises.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Africa competitiveness Report for 2004, the technology index ranks South Africa highest followed by Mauritius, Tunisia and Botswana among 25 countries while Kenya ranked 8th and Uganda 10th in the penetration of technology in the economy.

“Information and Communication Technology [ICT] is fast becoming an all-pervasive ‘meta technology’,” said Alice Ouedraogo, director of the International Labor Organization, ILO sub regional office in Addis Ababa “and in its absence, a country would face binding constraints to undertaking international transactions: be they trade, investments, capital flows or labor mobility.”

Connecting the knowledge economy with health employment Professor Yunkap Kwankam, coordinator of e-Helath under World Health Organization said there is a shortage of close to one million health workers in Africa, which is below a critical minimum needed to provide basic services.

“We can’t build professional schools for nursing, midwifery, medicine, pharmacy…etc fast enough. We need creative alternatives such as eLearning, blended learning and other forms of ICT-mediated instruction,” he said.
It was indicated though reliable access to critical information and knowledge is the basis for human development, the majority of libraries and information centers in Africa can’t effectively play their role as veritable and reliable sources of information and knowledge due to inadequate funding, limited technology application, stunted training and development programs and poor or no physical infrastructure.

In the course of the weeklong meeting, four CODI sub-committees have looked at the knowledge economy and employment issue from the perspective of data, geo-information libraries and ICT and is expected to have gone through how African countries can access knowledge and information to utilize its human resources for he global economy.

The government experts, practitioners and observers participating in the meeting also call for recommendations to boost employment in the knowledge and economy sector. It will also set the agenda for ECA’s two-year program on ICT, science and technology for development.