 Hello. Good evening. Good morning, depending on where you are joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. We are pleased to bring you this month's installment of 2021 E4C seminar series. This seminar series aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We host new research institutions mandatory to learn about their work advancing the United Nations development goals. My name is Kemani Chege. I am a Kenyan journalist with an interest in reporting sciences and the link between sustainable development. I have spent some considerable time reporting on health, agriculture, environment and how that relates to general sustainable development. I'm currently the inaugural editorial fellow at E4C Fellowship for the 2021 cohort. I'll be one of your moderators for today's seminar along with Dr. Jesse Austin Breneman. The seminar you are participating in today will address the engineering education in Kenya and the career pathway of young graduates. Do we have enough engineering graduates to take on the social entrepreneurship scene? Do we have a critical mass of engineers that can boost south to south cooperation? We'll hear more from our panelists today. And we are joined by Dr. Kamau Gasegi, the founding director of Gearbox. Dr. June Mandete, a lecturer at Kenyatta University. We also have Eric Okumu, an engineer at OPI bus, a Kenyan immobility company, and Emmanuel Kenyanyui, an engineer based in Nairobi and a 2021 E4C fellow. Welcome to you all. The seminar recording will be archived on our E4C site and our YouTube channel. Both those URLs are listed in the slide. Information on upcoming seminars is available also on the E4C site. E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C team at researchatengineeringforchange.org. We also invite you to share your feedback at the end of the seminar to inform our strategy. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with the hashtag E4C seminar series. This seminar series was launched by Dr. Jesse Austin Breneman, who leads the ASME Engineering Global Development Research Committee and our co-moderator today. Dr. Jesse Austin Breneman is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2014 from MIT. He also holds an SM in mechanical engineering and a BS in ocean engineering from MIT. He currently is the director of the Global Design Laboratory. The group focuses on developing design processes and support tools to help multidisciplinary design teams think at a system level when performing complex system design tasks. This includes getting the best ways to incorporate system-level interactions between stakeholders in emerging markets into design and decision-making processes. Jesse will be moderating the Q&A session within this seminar. Before we move on to our presenters, I would like to tell you more a bit about engineering for change. E4C is a knowledge organization, a digital platform and global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture and more. We invite you to become a member of E4C. The membership is free and provides access to news and thought readers, a prior art database of 1000 essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding, funding cores, fellowships and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to their interests. Learn more about our impact by visiting our website, www.engineeringforchange.org, stroke our impact. Our research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by E4C Fellows, annually on behalf of our partners and sponsors and delivered as digestible reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page to explore our field insights, research collaborations and review of the state of engineering for global development. If you have research questions or want to work with us on a research project as a research fellow, please contact us at research at engineeringforchange.org. We also want to invite you to our upcoming virtual saloon with IEEE on October 27th about connectivity and access to the era of COVID-19. Also, don't forget impact engineered. You are invited to our annual event and to join us for illuminating speeches, interactive experiences, special lunch and a celebration of innovation on December 2nd. Registration is free on www.impactengineering.org. Now, I would like to take a moment to meet our audience. Please use the chat window which is located in the bottom right of your screen and just type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slide. I can see somebody is joining us from Brooklyn, New York, Taipei, Taiwan, Chicago, USA and Haba. We also have somebody from Nairobi, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Virginia, Westliet. Welcome you. Thank you very much. Good. Thank you. Pakistan. Interesting. Thank you. A couple of additional instructions before we get started. You can use the chat window to share remarks during the seminar and if you have technical questions, just send a private chat to Engineering for Change admin. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. You may also try to open a Zoom app in a different browser. During the seminar, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type in your questions or presenter. Again, if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides. We'll gather these questions to ask the presenters at the end of the seminar. You leave at least 10 minutes for Q&A, so be sure to send us your questions beforehand. Okay. Now, as our first presenter, I want to welcome Dr. Kamau Gasegi. Dr. Kamau Gasegi is the founding Executive Director of Gearbox Kenya, of Kenya's first open maker space for rapid prototyping based in Nairobi. Gearbox provides a unique window into industry 4.0 capabilities to innovators in Kenya and it offers incubation and acceleration services. Gasegi also co-founded the Africa Innovation Ecosystem Group, a company that focuses on creating and manufacturing real estate-based innovation centers of varying scales. Before establishing Gearbox, he headed the University of Nairobi's Science and Technology Pack, where he founded Alab, a fab lab full of manufacturing and prototyping tools in 2009. He then built another lab at the Riruta set right in an impoverished neighborhood in the city. Gasegi is a member of the Global Council of the Future of Production under the World Economic Forum and of the Consultative Advisory Group of the World Bank's Partnership for Skills in the Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology. Dr. Kamau, are we getting enough engineering graduates from our universities? Please unmute your mic, Dr. Kamau. Yes, thank you very much for that introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here to share my views on this important topic. So I'll be quite quick, what I'll do is I'll begin by answering the question by saying really that when you want to know, when you think about how many engineers are required for an economy, it'll really depend on that economy's ability to absorb those engineers into a useful work. If you look at, if you Google the country in the world that has the most engineers, it's Jordan, and Jordan has the highest number of engineers per capita in the entire world. And so if you think about the economy of Jordan, it's not necessarily known for how industrialized it is. And so the answer to the question will, for me, depend very much on how these engineers can be sort of used within the context of the country, Kenya. So I represent, as you heard, a company called Gearbox. There's also two non-profit companies that we have that I'll be explaining a little bit about in a minute, but I'll begin by just giving a bit of a background. So in East Africa, we have basic three countries in East Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania on the bottom left over there. And this slide really is to emphasize that over the last 10 or so years, the economies in this part of the world have become dominated by imports from China, and which account for about 22% of all the imports into the region. And what's happened over the same period of time in a country like Kenya, which was the dominant player as far as manufacturing is concerned in the region, our manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has dropped from about 13, 14% range down to less than 10% right now. And so this is really a function of the fact that we are importing more of what we need than manufacturing locally. And a lot of people agree that the basis of a healthy economy should be that you can produce a good proportion of what you consume from within your own borders. And so by that measure, we're not doing too well. And the kinds of people that are needed in order to make this happen are in large part engineers. Some of the work that I did while serving on the Global Future Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Production at the World Economic Forum, I actually don't serve anymore my term finished. But we were looking at country readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And we all are aware that the world is going through this rapid change in terms of technologies. And this impacts every sphere of life, and most certainly manufacturing. And so in this process, we're in this analysis, we look at a country, if you look at the slide, there is a structure of production on the left hand side. And that's a snapshot of where the country, any country's economy is, and it's divided between the complexity, economic complexity in that country, which is a measure of the variety of things that you can make within that country competitively, and then the scale of the market. And then on the right, you have these tools that drive us for production, and there's technology and innovation, human capital, global trade and investment. And all of these are what a policymaker in any given country would have as tools to try to expand that structure of production and be prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And so what we're speaking about in this topic is human capital. But if the human capital, like the example from Jordan, is such that it isn't able to engage what it can do adequately because of other factors, then we must be aware as we discuss this, that there's more to it than the number of engineers or even the quality of engineers that you have in terms of the impact that you might have on the economy. And so for Kenya, we're looking at the complexity, that factor that I spoke of in terms of how much you've actually produced in the country. And our biggest exports are tea is about 18% cut flowers, refined petroleum, you're looking at coffee, tropical fruits. And these, if you look at this figure here, which is called a product as space analysis, the dark area in the middle of this image is where you have the greatest connectivity between different types of products and then the basis that you have within your economy to produce those products. If you're in that zone that's dark, that means that as a policymaker, you should be pushing those particular areas so that you can have the growth that you need. And those particular exports that I mentioned, if you look on the periphery, you can see tea, you can see coffee, refined petroleum cut flowers, all the things that are the major exports from Kenya are not within the zone at all. So it means that the interconnectedness around our main revenue earners are not sufficiently there. And this typically translates into the fact that engineers that we have in the country are really not as able as they should be to engage in production, to be actively using the engineering for production. So I taught engineering for many years here in Kenya. And I found that a lot of the graduates that were coming out of the University of Nairobi, where I taught were actually going into auditing and they were going into banking and areas outside of what they were trained to do. And really, you can't blame them because they basically have to be able to get out there and earn a living. And very often a typical student will have a lot of dependence that they need to be able to take care of as well. So they go to where they can earn the best. And so these are some of the challenges that we have. So I'm sure we're going to get into this further. I'll just very briefly show a short video of what we do at Gearbox so that those who are here can actually get a sense. In Gearbox, we have a platform where we make it possible for people who have ideas to come and use equipment that they otherwise probably wouldn't have access to. And they can do this on a membership basis. It works a little bit like a gym where you get a membership and then you come in and use the equipment. And we also are there for people to actually consult contractors to make them. So we have a variety of machines. The laser cutlery store, we have this mill that we're able to mill metal is able to build plastics as well. Also there's a variety of parts that you can make using a machine like this. Of course, CD printing is something that you cannot miss when you're trying to do rapid prototyping and be able to get a good prototype made in a short time, which is a very important part in the prototyping process and engineering. We also are very cognizant of the importance of electronics. And so we have a setup so we can do circuitry and we can make a one-off circuit quite easily quickly within our center and there's a robot that you can place it both along with that as you can see in this image. And this does about 10,000 components per hour, but it's really quite small. We've been able to use it like in the interest of this particular circuit to make like 50 devices to go out there and test in the marketplace. We also make machines. So this is a CNC plasma cutter that we made quite recently for a center in the coast of Kenya, the Red Cross. And we have at least 10 engineers right now who each dependent they can do it. And you know, you have to get an army of people who make these machines to make an impact on the economy. And this is my head of engineering, his name is William Maluklu and he's making a pipe and an automated pipe vendor. He's doing this in Silicon Valley. We work with Autodesk and he was then able to come here and start a company with many machines. That's a rotor motor that makes water tanks. You know, you put the plastic in powder form into this mold that is shaped like a tank. It's metal and then the flames melted and as it rotates and tilts back and forth, you get the internal walls coated with this plastic tank. This is a new capacity that we have. We're going from just being able to report that we're actually doing manufacturing. It's a great company from the UK or Europe yourself. And now we're able to make circuits in SK. And so we're really leveraging the fact that IoT is a growing sector. And of course, as part of the fourth industrial revolution, we see this as a very important thing to be able to provide for. I'm coming to the end of my introduction. This is just a project that we've been doing that is for job creation. It's greenhouses, hydroponic farming. And we're looking with the MasterCard Foundation and the Kenya Commercial Bank Foundation to be able to create jobs. And the engineers make all the bits and pieces, the bending the metal for the greenhouses, making the water tanks, the sensors for sensing humidity and temperature. And these frames that you can see here where the plants are actually grown. And the model here is that we, the partners, find the market for the youth. And we're able to get engineers to actually design and make and sell us machines that we require. And we're hoping that this model going forward is something that can be applied, not just to universities across Kenya and even other countries in Africa, but also some of the intermediate type institutions like Tivet, the vocational colleges, the polytechnics and that sort of thing. So I think as far as introduction, I think I'll stop there and allow others to have their presentations as well. Thanks very much, Kim, money for this opportunity. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Kamau, for those captivating comments and views. I hope we can be able to get more insight when we get to the, when we start moderating the panel. Now we turn to Dr. June Madete. Dr. June Madete is a biomechanics engineer, researcher and senior lecturer at Kenyatta University, special interests and expertise in motion analysis, software and hardware. Her research involves applying the knowledge of clinical motion and analysis techniques she gained in the UK to advance biomechanical adoption in Sahara Africa. She's the coordinator of the African Biomedical Engineering Consortium that seeks to develop and market the biomedical engineering profession within Kenya, through knowledge and skill transfer with students, lecturers, scientists, and the industry across various sets in Africa. She has mentored numerous students on biodesign via the UBORA virtual platform for the core design of OSMDs, guiding device and developers towards compliance with international recognized quality standards and regulation for safety and efficacy. So Dr. June Madete, how would you describe engineering education and the process of building graduates in Kenyan universities and what needs to change? Yeah, we forget to mute. Thank you for that introduction. So I'm going to see how I'll release to Dr. Kamau's presentation, which was excellent. He's left the education sector and he's come and is trying to do a very important task of creating that at market so much. So when I start my presentation, my name is June Madete. As you heard, I have been a lecturer for a while by mechanics, but when I came to the country, I realized that biomechanics was advanced. So we needed to teach our students something more. And that's when we started focusing on machine design in teaching. What my goal is, is to introduce machine design from the beginning. And that's what I've noticed is making a difference in our departments. Kenyatta University, where I'm from, you're very welcome. And we have six departments where we do electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, biosystems, energy technology, petroleum engineering, civil engineering, and computer information technology. How are we preparing our students? So the first step we always do is to make sure our courses are credited for the market. And the biggest stakeholder in Kenya is the engineer's board of Kenya. And our courses need to be accredited for the students graduating to be able to enter the workforce and be able to be registered as engineers and to be mentored through their professional development. So engineer board of Kenya is required, you have to get registered by them in order to practice engineering in the country. And this is a requirement by the law. So we have to make sure the courses we are teaching are accredited by the engineer board of Kenya, otherwise our students are not going to be prepared. There are different categories of registration. There's graduate engineer, professional engineer, but we can go into that if I get a question. Another way we're preparing these students is by making sure our curriculums satisfy the Commission for University Education. And that's a body that was developed by the University's Act in the country. And they make sure they do the inspection, the monitoring and evaluation of our universities. On top of this, so the two of them combine and make sure we have the right staff ratio, make sure we have the right laboratories, make sure we have the right, essentially the best training we can. So another thing maybe I'd mention in Kenya, our engineering courses are five years. And another thing that is very important that I normally find very passionate is that we have the accreditation process always ensures that all our engineers go for attachments. So from the time they finish their second year, they go for attachment for three months. At the end of third year, they go for another attachment for three months. And at the end of fourth year, they go for attachment for another three months. So another aspect maybe that we try and incorporate is the aspect of design. And I've been lecturing at the University for about seven years. So I've seen two groups graduate. And the most promising graduating class was the one that just completed because they had a whole almost 12 months at home. So they came to us and they were like, okay, you teach us design, you teach us design. How can you help us with design things? How can we prototype without having to think about the cost? So our University was very generous and assisted. And we realized that, yes, the design training has actually impacted our students. And just to mention a few, they developed a mechanical ventilator in the past year. They also have developed a prototype satellite box. It's not very clear there, but that's another aspect. And then we have the students here showing that the mechanical ventilator, the swabs that are also developed at the University. So we are seeing the fruits of including design aspects in every avenue of the curriculum. And this is something we would like to incorporate more, not just for, for example, myself, I include it in my machine design. So it doesn't mean that it's in the curriculum. So the next step is to modify our curriculum so that we meet the students and cater for that need for innovation and move forward from that. And maybe, okay, I think my slide is, so thinking every single aspect of design, so that by the time you graduate, you can be able to go and talk to Gearbox and be able to say, I have this idea, how can you help me? Without actually going for auditing, I hear you, Dr. Kamau, they always go for the auditing aspect. And sometimes it's painful and you've trained them for five years, and then they're in a bank. So we are trying to change them as they graduate, not only emphasizing, for example, two years ago, not all engineering courses in the country were accredited. So that means even if they graduate after five years, even when they're trying to be mentors as an engineer, they're not getting there. So we're trying to make sure we are getting it from the beginning and getting it right. So if there's not any other questions for us at Kenyatta University from the beginning, we want to make sure that we are training these students for every aspect, not only innovation, not only design, not only thinking outside the box and trying to change the market, but also making sure that in the terms of policy, and for example, the Commission for University Education, and for Engineers Board of Kenya, we tag them along. If there's anything we need to change, we make sure we talk to them. So that's how we prepare them for the market. I'll leave it there for now, unless there's any question. Yeah, thank you, Kamani. Thank you very much, Dr. June, and we hope the students who are joining us can relate to the changes that are happening in the curriculum and the local universities. If you have any questions, please remember to include them in the Q&A section to be considered for this section later in today's seminar. Now from my perspective of an engineering graduate and the Agenda to Employment, I want to welcome Eric Okumu. Eric Okumu is an Electric Vehicle Research and Development Engineer at OPI-Bus, an electric mobility company based in Kenya. OPI-Bus vision is to make electric transport more accessible to a broader market by making the technology more cost-effective and simplifying development. The company focuses on all electric conversion kits for fleet vehicles such as ride trucks, public transport, all my tattoos as we call them here in Kenya, and buses, as well as all electric motorcycles and energy system. Eric received a Bachelor's of Engineering degree in Electrical and Electronics in 2018 from Technical University of Kenya. After graduating, he has spent the last three years of his professional experience in electric vehicles field, specializing in electrified power train concept in areas such as motors, inventor, battery, management systems, DC converters, on-board charges and battery packs. So Eric, what was your experience transitioning from engineering school to the job market? Okay, my experience, actually my experience was good because I actually was picked right away from the university by one by the company. They had some linkages with one of our professors. So actually my transition was not that hard, but I'll just try and just highlight some of the areas where maybe my fellow graduates are facing challenges. Just trying to help us know some of the challenges that some of our graduates are facing as they enter the job market here in Kenya. I bet this maybe might apply to some of the countries which are represented here, or maybe it might be better in other areas, but I would say that the journey has been well. I first of all maybe as an introduction, I work for OPI bus for the last three years as it has been mentioned and it has been a great experience being that it's a very new area in technology that is happening everywhere. There is new stuff that are happening and yeah it's been a great experience and a great moment to be in that company up to now. I just just dwell in some of the challenges that graduates are facing that are maybe making them not be ready for the market. I think my previous speakers have mentioned some of the areas that maybe would try to reinforce this and all try to put more input into my areas of discussions today. So are any engineers ready for the job market? Looking at the numbers, we have at least 2000 professional engineers. I think those who have spent at least three years as registered graduate engineers and being mentored by somebody, then we see we have almost 15,000 registered graduate engineers. Those are those who have maybe just transitioned from university and just finding their way into the field and yeah and we have almost 30,000 graduate engineers who either have maybe have moved into other careers or maybe they've not had an opportunity to practice engineering. So these are these are the people maybe who are facing these challenges that maybe I'm going to just address and highlight as we try to decipher them more. So I think one of the things over my time at the university, some of the areas that I found that were a bit dragging our engineering field here in Kenya is maybe a shortage of teaching professions. I remember I used to share lecturers from almost five universities. Some could travel all the way from Eldorajicis around 150 kilometers just to come and lecture us and you could find them strange. Sometimes we had to like have like two lectures in a week and sometimes we even miss just because we are lacking that expertise but nevertheless we at least over the years I've seen the time I was in campus we've seen more and more lecturers from different fields even from abroad just coming to reinforce that. Sometimes we find we have outdated syllabus and equipment sometimes you could get us trying to program microcontrollers from 1990s and yet you are almost in the new era. I think one of the reasons could be maybe the people responsible but then they are not yet updated themselves with the current technology. So I think that has been an issue but also just a positive thing towards that we've seen new equipments like from the university I was in which is Technical University we had some CNC, some one of the most advanced CNC machines in the in East Africa being brought by the Chinese government they've really helped so much in impacting their skills to the students. Also there has been some lack of emphasis on research and skills. Sometimes I remember back in campus we could it could be just about the grades and not what what you are going to get out of it. So I think that was another area that maybe we needed need to look into as the engineering fraternity here in Kenya just to have more emphasis on research and skills because you found that most of the university in other areas the most of the projects most of the startups developed from the universities and it's also good to say that even in here in Kenya there are some students who have have established campus directly from the universities so that's a key area that we really need to look into. Okay there has been also emphasis so much on employment instead of entrepreneurship. Most of the graduate engineers have in mind that they always look into the best places to work to maybe the big companies like in Kenya most of the most of after companies like the Kenzen and the Kenapa and Lighting and these manufacturing big companies but there's not so much emphasis on self-employment which could really bridge the gap between which could bridge the gap for the unemployed graduates in Kenya. Another area is inexperienced graduates yeah most if and most companies usually prefer people who've been in the market already so that they don't spend much more time on training and yeah and maybe time so I think that's something that has made most of graduates not have jobs yeah another area I would say there have been few platforms to showcase innovation maybe I would like to tell maybe a doctor coming from gearbox I think their firm has really provided so much have tried to bridge this gap I remember participating in one of the hackathons and I got a scholarship just to go and study embedded systems in gearbox so at least such platforms really provide us with opportunities to showcase our talents for people to to see us to see the graduates and so that maybe they can secure employment another area is just one networking skills yeah most professionals most graduate engineers don't join professional organizations like IEEE, IBK and and they even don't have like active link in accounts to just link up with professionals we could share opportunities with them I think that's one other thing and also little or not drive little to no self-driving just trying to cause you find the industry is changing so fast and graduates really need to keep abreast with the new technology so that's one other thing that has really made our engineers not to be suitable for the job market yeah another onto my last slide inclination on expertise yeah you find that most companies are preferring maybe expertise to handle projects sometimes maybe like maybe like just as a picture last week we have the expressway most of the engineers you find they are from China so you don't find like most of our indigenous engineers being part of those projects because probably the the machines that they are handling are beyond their scope or maybe they've not had a chance to interact with them so those are some of the areas that maybe our we could try to breed to help graduates maybe get employment another bottleneck this has been a really big for some of engineers the it became just as madame june has said we've had it's really sometimes if you find because you are you get you get selected by a government body to join a government university just to be told you're not qualified by another government institution which is beats the irony in it so I think the bureaucracy sometimes it's there but luckily some of this has been addressed some of the causes have been accredited and just as madame june said I think it's good to just have a platform where all these issues are addressed and so that the students don't suffer at the end of the day the last thing is lack of mentorship from industry individuals yeah most of us I for me I personally wish I had somebody to mentor me before I transitioned out of the university but I'll have there's some things I've really done better maybe I'll have invested more time in doing some things yeah because I think the dark black box that exists among the graduates where we don't know where we are going into we don't know what awaits us in the field so I think there's there's real value in mentorship for our engineering graduates yeah thank you so much for my presentation really appreciate yeah that's that picture is of okay bus what we do we do retrofitting our digital vehicles to electric and it's really glad to be part of changing their way just trying to make our world sustainable yeah thank you so much and yeah thank you for having me thank you Eric for sharing your experience as well as telling us or giving us insights on what your peers go through after graduating and the things that maybe they can do to make it better thank you for that I'm sure some engineering graduates are joining us today can relate to this journey and now last but not least our very own Emmanuel Kenyajui an E4C fellow Kenyajui is an engineer based in Nairobi here in Kenya he graduated from Jomokinyata University of Agriculture and Technology with a bachelor's of science in mechatronic engineering he presently works as a software engineer working on building products services and experiences that empower the society as a 2021 E4C fellow Emmanuel has been working with Kickstart International to support the improvement of impeller design for solar irrigation pumps to be used by small scale farmers in this region Kenyajui how can engineering graduates from Kenya work at the international level cross border collaboration or something like that you just completed an international fellowship with the E4C and you can tell us how that one has helped that aspect of international engineers working at the international level so um yeah thanks Kimani I hope you can hear me well um yep as Kimani has mentioned my name is Emmanuel Kenyajui I just concluded a few weeks ago um and yeah maybe to answer your question um so just a second um yeah so maybe I'll answer that question in um as I'm completing this but uh that's who I am I studied uh PSE mechatronic engineering in Jaguette class of 2018 um and maybe highlight of me as a student because what I've really appreciated about it is um everything that um has been mentioned by all the panelists is something that I faced personally as a student um so highlight of that was um that year Otto Descalda what they call the design next Africa challenge which was across the entire Africa and the project that me and my partners did got to win the first prize for product design which um in the sense is we do have a capacity as engineers in Kenya to actually deliver world-class results because this was a first uh this was the one of our kind uh competition across all of Africa and um yeah it was out of uh I think both architecture and engineering that um engineers uh we as engineering students in Kenya got to win that um yeah I work as a software engineer so I'm one of the statistics that has been mentioned by um Dr. Kamau um Dr. Madeta and Eric um regarding engineers actually leaving the space but I believe there's more potential for us to actually provide quality work um around that um yeah for this particular year I worked with Kixer International um at data processing and visualization project for water pumps um it has been mentioned and for that particular um time um sorry we got to um build out um what we'd call uh leveraging on IoT so we had um some hardware devices that Kixer used to use for monitoring pumps in the field so Kixer International is a company that builds out pumps and they lend them out to farmers in the field and out of that um they normally collect some logs out of those um devices they leverage um having them on SMS so have the devices send on SMS to a base station in Nairobi but sorry um out of it um they take a lot of time to sift through the information um and actually make sense out of it so this would all happen on an Excel file but uh coming into the fellowship and we proposed leveraging on IoT so that we're able to use the same devices they're having in the field but now send data over um the internet and um actually visualize this um in real time so we were able to do this using our custom web application and um just some few tweaks here and there on the hardware devices and all this was made possible by the fact that uh as an engineering student um as Dr. Madeta had had mentioned um we get to we get the chance to go into the field for I think that's almost um three times so that's in your second day you go for internship 30 you go for internship for the internship um but this has also now been reinforced in the sense with by the fact that now we have more practical places to go in turning out one of these places I've mentioned maybe is gearbox um going into companies where um they actually support a real real um real life experience um and personally to me um that really helped a lot um actually even be able to achieve what we're able to do with kickstart being able to achieve what I was able to uh my team and I able to achieve um for finally a project as students because um we're getting to a point where as much as that has not been the case where academia industry and government collaborate to create an enabling environment for engineering students to thrive and but is slowly taking shape with such initiatives as what Dr. Kamau is being at care box and changing of curricula by what um Kenyatta University has mentioned maybe they're doing to actually make it more advanced and more relevant to what we're doing and yeah just you yourself creating that getting that extra initiative to jump onto these opportunities and present your best foot forward um to actually achieve what you want to do um yeah but uh as much as I have for this presentation um back to you Kewai. Thank you thank you Kenyanyu for giving us that insight and um I'm really proud to know that some of those things are working just beyond Kenya and can be adopted across the maybe even the african continent and beyond thank you for that and now we get into our moderated session where I will be asking the panelists to shed more light on the topic of the day and I think I want to start with the Dr. Kamau. A maker space can sometimes have skills people with the and skill people skill people who have probably no degree but just talent they're also people with maybe a diploma in in in some of the areas and with hands on experience how do these people compare to university graduates probably that you have worked with? Yeah thanks for the question so broadly speaking um you know uh the university experiences both of the young engineers in their very excellent presentations Eric and Emanuel have explained that there tends to be and this is true in many african countries uh a sort of over emphasis on theoretical exposure. June mentioned that the the degree program is actually five years that's after 12 years of schooling and in many countries that are very advanced and and seem to be able to to to to to to supply enough engineers for their industries they have four year programs and some even have three year programs and yet the engineers are able to plug in and do will appear to be a good job since their industries are doing well so we we tend to maybe overemphasize the the theory and I know quite a lot of engineers who will graduate and feel a sense of maybe imposter syndrome I have a first first class degree or whatever but you know I really don't feel the confidence in terms of being able to do stuff and you know there's no fault of their own um and and so um people who are um out there that you describe who you know have skills and maybe have not been very exposed to a formal education will obviously be be quite good at what they do especially if they're doing it every single day even though there may be certain things that they might have to to to unlearn or to learn in a different way and in Kenya I happen to be with the national industrial training authority and that's the authority that oversees training within the workplace in Kenya not within the institutions and I chair the board there and we have what we call recognition of prior learning and so there's such people can walk into any center and then um you know if they say for example there are welder and then the trainers will say okay here weld weld this or weld that or you know it was um you know mig welding or electric arc welding or whatever um um you know oxy acetylene welding and they're given a task and then they're evaluated and then they can get certification and we've just created an entire um uh schema scheme scheme for for for what these certificates are and the highest certification is equivalent to postgraduate level currently and that's master craftsman for and so you can have a person who's never you know been in any formal education but has worked maybe 20 years uh taught how to weld by their by their aunt or something and uh and now come in here and they do a test and uh you know they they now have the equivalent of a master's degree uh you know because of the test so so these are some of the ways that we'd like to be able to recognize that then at Gearbox we also teach short courses so we're trying to step out of the the typical uh traditional model whereby you need to sort of start all the educational process through first principles and I'm not knocking that that's extremely important the rigor is important but sometimes people just for whatever reason either they just haven't had the opportunity to to to get those first principles uh or or perhaps it's somebody who does have even a degree but wants to learn something new because there's such rapid change in in technologies in in in the marketplace and they don't want to go and learn all about this new area they just want to be able to get some skills that they can use for themselves and so we try to sort of tailor courses to to feed that that sort of a need so I think there's ways of tackling it and and and certainly any country should should really want to create all the mechanisms possible to to make their citizens better able to contribute to to to the uh overall economy and for this week we use the term national innovation system to to speak about that where especially engineering related activity is concerned you know you have a time in Kenya where um the the first almost well the first person that I remember building an aircraft in Kenya who didn't have a formal education and the aircraft actually flew and his misfortune was that he flew into a military complex uh uh you know uh compound and so his reward was arrest you know he was arrested and put in jail and that's not a national innovation system uh you know what what a natural innovation system should be able to do is is in a sense audit the population for talent where technology is concerned and so on and then be able to help that person channel the effort and the energy to be able to polish or to learn what they need to to be able to be more actively involved uh so that you're not just looking at the traditional uh types of qualification you're looking at what people can do you're looking at aptitude in particularly in countries where uh so many people miss out on educational opportunities just because they can't afford it and so that's where we're trying to move to and this is very important also for policy from a policy perspective uh governments being able to recognize um uh some areas that uh identify and then and then and then um sort of very actively pursue educational opportunities that are not eight to five because people can very often not afford to not work in other words they is hand to mouth so if you're going to teach them something new it has to be after hours perhaps and so on and and so all of these are very important your question I think I've gone beyond what perhaps you are asking but I hope that that helps and allow others to to to pitch in as well it does it does and thank you thank you for for that response Dr. Kamau now I turn to Dr. Madete some education systems around the world shape their curriculum according to national projects goals and uh aspirations so is engineering education in Kenya helping meet a certain national goal for example we can talk of Kenya has the vision 20 that I don't know whether it may be and beyond are we shaping our education system to to add some of those national goals um thank you for the question and uh I think we are and uh because of the accreditation process um it took a long time for the accreditation process to stop being old school I want to say old school um it was what it was there before and nobody was changing it and it was what it is so now I think they are trying to change it to fit that and including all the new vision 2030 for example for Kenya and including them in their processes so for example uh biomedical engineering could never have been thought of any like okay the traditional courses in engineering in Kenya are electrical engineering mechanical engineering and civil engineering so the new courses that like for example mechatronics was one of the first one to be recognized apart from the three coins then you have biosystems which was always there from the beginning but it was really being accredited only I think one university had it accredited because they had a firm so now they're like okay biosystems more than just having fixing a tractor it's more than that we have biomedical engineering many people don't understand it but they they they have embraced it and actually the stakeholders are being asked to venture in and to you know like for example if I talk to engineer board of Kenya and they say uh I studied telemedicine and I would like to be and I am a biomedical engineer they'll be like no telemedicine is IT so it's that conversation now they are listening to that they're listening to the fact that okay telemedicine is is a part of engineering they're listening to the fact that if I'm going to do aerospace engineering there's different aspects of it that are different from the core engineers that are used to in Kenya so I think with the vision with the infrastructure with how the world is going and even like for example seven years ago they they they discredited all courses which had IT in the engineering school of engineering system now they're like oh everything has IT so we need this back so they are recognizing that and they're including that in the system I'm just hoping Dr. Kamau one day will do a three year course but until then we'll we'll stick to this one and try and make it better even if it's in you know like for example the idea of five years was that they they didn't do 12 years they used to do 10 years so you come and do the other two years but when they added the 12 years before that they didn't remove the others so okay we have five years how can we make these five years count for now until now we can change it to the shorter courses so I think we are changing and we are being listened to as a biomedical engineer and the first time I came here they were like we don't know what to do with you but now they're like I'm being called everywhere oh come we need this we need that so the government is definitely changing in the right direction and I am attached to that so yes thank you Dr. Madeta for for your contribution and we agree with you many things are changing along the way and yeah some years back some of the courses that are being offered were not hard so now I turn on to Eric Okumo and I will ask you maybe I don't think it was all that bad to your university and I'm sure there's a critical skill that you picked up that you have been that has been very helpful in your career so far yes I think the biggest my biggest skill that I took that has been really critical in my career life is that ability to research cause my work every day involves research and development it's about learning new things finding how to do things the right way so I remember we used to be given lots of assignments and sometimes I am one of those guys who didn't want like people who maybe I try to see what others have done or maybe trying to wait for us to do that work so that I may be maybe just duplicate it and just hand it over I was one of those people who was really really self driven so I'm just finding my way through the internet trying to find the right places the right document the right information I think that was one of my key key take home when I was in the university that really has really helped me so much in my work today and cause I it's each and every day you have to keep on finding the best of being something because you always in the workplace you're always faced with an issue and you are maybe the last person to handle it you're after everyone else has maybe has reached a dead end you're the last person to come up with a solution so I think that was my take home and another thing is just that the desire to learn new things and that the self drive as one of the people who in the university could just try learn new software smart lab auto card from even I remember doing some coding and stuff so I think through that I have really inculcated that in my personal life because as you understand the immobility and the immobility field is quite new and there's no like people with expertise here in Kenya probably so you have to like go to the internet and try to find some courses just to be out to date with what is happening in the industry and I think that has really helped me so much I have quite I've done quite a number of courses online that have really helped shaped my career path in the immobility area so that desire to be so driven and and also just maybe one last thing the desire the just networking that desire to network with people around me I really especially I use LinkedIn a lot and just a professional organization I'm a member of IEEE young professional society here in Kenya so I get to link up with various members I via LinkedIn I get to attend various webinars conferences just to just to learn what's happening in the industry what is what is changing what is being implemented so I think that that is just that self motivation self drive is one of the key things that I picked up from the university yeah thank you thank you Eric for that insight I think the the discussion has been going on very well and it's very interesting for so many people but I think we are running short of time I kindly ask you to give us another 15 minutes so that we can handle the the questions the questions are many and I think based on the time that we have I'll bring in Dr. Jesse to hand in the to handle the questions now. Yes thank you Kamani and I want to just thank the thank the panelists again for it's really insightful both context and insight into the current state and the future of engineering education both in Kenya I think we have a lot of lessons for engineering education everywhere I mean I think we should all be trying to answer these questions and learn from each other in this way so I wanted there's a lot of questions in the Q&A if people have some questions that they'd like to ask please to make sure that you can put it in there and you can you can see the answers me some some of them have already been typed there but just to synthesize and I'm going to try my best to synthesize in the time that that we have remaining here I want to talk about I want to ask the panel in general about this balance between entrepreneurship and and getting just jobs in growing the the industrial sector or the engineering job sector workforce in different ways so for you guys when we're thinking about the number of stakeholders that we have here and maybe I'll start with Dr. Medete how how as an educator how are we preparing people like balancing students that may want to go into entrepreneurship versus students that may want to just get a job or or or do something else so how are you guys approaching sort of that balance in the education space thanks doc that's a very good question and it's been asked actually recently over the past few years because it was not included in the curriculum especially we have one course in third year for 35 hours in the whole five years on entrepreneurship and it's general and it's not focused on innovation or prototyping or even like getting a patent for example so the idea is for the new revised curriculum we include most many of that within the courses but at the moment we're encouraging them to go to places where they'll gain skills just as Eric said and to you know venture out like for example my students I think Dr. Kamau many of them have come to Gearbox and we encourage them to go to incubation centers or accelerators where they learn these skills but as I have to say now we there we have an incubation center at the university which takes all students not only engineering and they get the skills there but it's to encourage them to venture out but I can say now for the revised curriculum we've definitely included that because they're building on their design and their innovation and without entrepreneurship your design and innovation will be stuck in a cupboard somewhere I always tell them that and then I always encourage them to solve a problem that people want solved so you can decide oh I'm very good at making a flying car but are we ready for a flying car but you can do a you know no swab which will make you you know a business and you know it can be able to solve a problem that is needed so it's just encouraging them not to to solve a problem and always ask the questions engineers forget to ask the questions and so it's we try and prepare that well I try and prepare them and we are one we are incorporating that aspect in the curriculum for now and I think even like the board I know the board the engineers board of Kenya whenever you take a course for them for accreditation there are aspects they look for within that where this innovation is designed as an entrepreneurship and also focal areas in the in the actual field so they are trying as well to make sure that it's included from the beginning so from the time we train them from before they they I like what Eric said a black box so they just we don't know what we're doing after we graduate we want them to know what they're doing after the graduate so I'm really pushing for that especially for biomedical engineering especially for the courses that are being done at our department and I'm sure that once people see the benefit of that it will be something that will happen often thank you oh thank you document that day for sharing that with us I want to ask another question a great question here from page welcome who's asking about sort of the bringing in the local culture and context into your practice as an engineer and I you know I think that we've had a number of conversations about this but I want to maybe direct this to to Dr. Kochi is to say how how do we balance the sort of how can we what is some of the advantages or uniqueness how can we leverage the uniqueness of the Kenyan context to really sort of drive this innovation right so I think when we were talking earlier you were talking about like hey here's some of the things that are both a challenge in terms of you know this is what our sector looks like these are the products that we are good at making and exporting and we have some sort of local advantage in doing so and I'm wondering how you guys are are matching that to the type of education type of engineers that that you guys are training whether it's through short courses or in other ways yeah that's a that's a great question so obviously the the difficulty of course is is in in having like and this is why a center like gearbox needs to have an R&D in order to be able to sort of look at what's going on and respond to it adequately because very often engineers are very busy engineering but not necessarily you know aware of what's happening in the marketplace so quite often the young guys are out to impress one another hey I can do this I saw it on the internet I can do it better than I saw it on the internet and two years later you crack it but the market couldn't care less and so we're very interested in teaching humans in the design and so the people understand what the market wants and needs and and and direct their efforts towards that and and to answer your question like we would be looking at we have an opportunity right now it's gearbox to set up our centers that sort of straddle the space between an education institution in the marketplace in some remote parts of the country so there's a part of the country that the Kenyans are will be very familiar and some of you the rest of you as well as a place called Lodwa and so they said to us well if we set up a center there what are we going to make in Lodwa and so we said well you know we need to research what's happening in Lodwa you know and you know what what is what is important to that particular local economy so that then we can tailor our intervention to what's happening there so we know that there's love camels and camel milk there's there's honey there's there's fish from lake lake lake Turkana there's there's so you know that kind of an approach is is what what is necessary and that's why you know you cannot have an eye the solution really lies in a lot of interconnected effort from a lot of different academic disciplines and so on so that that to me is is really the way to do it and the market has to drive it so that ultimately it makes sense the other very important player in all of this is is the government of course and the government like in Kenya we we have there's one estimate that I heard and the the government is responsible for 70 percent of the economy so you know what the government in any country does it pulls in lots of taxpayer money from all the citizens and then applies it in accordance with the wisdom of those leaders or the lack thereof and so obviously in any country the biggest player in the economy is the government and so for us we think it's extremely important to to for the government in a country like ours to say well we're going to source as much of what we need as possible locally okay so we need say we need computers and how far away are we from making computers and is it worth putting effort resources into increasing that capacity versus maybe say textiles or you know because there's a limited amount of money that they can actually apply and so there has to be some very well researched approach towards deciding where to place that effort and then of course when when they say we need textiles then the the the government somebody in the government should go to the universities and say what can you guys do to train people within textiles what kind of programs do you have currently and so on and can we you know marshal some some some effort resources and and so on towards getting that capacity and the reason is blah blah blah so justified so again there isn't all the money so you you need to be able to to focus on what's where the biggest advantage is you know so you know there may be some a lot of complexity in say for example designing an automated window winder for a car but you know is that really going to help your economy versus an effective way of assessing quality of milk for example because this is a percentage of the economy that relies on dairy farmers and and and so on and this is how many jobs we can get if we are able to to do this better and import substitution as a as a sort of a policy directive that then filters down into you know the entire capacity within the economy to be able to substitute for those imports. Yeah thank you so much Dr. Cromwell for for sharing that with us um you know and I and I absolutely agree I think that there's a you know this idea of you know really making sure that we're developing a workforce that works for our context I think is just so important and and you know I really thank both of you you know Dr. McCarthy and Dr. Cromwell for sharing these types of pathways to try and do that what should we be considering as we try and go and move forward and do exactly that and I think we can generalize that to many many different contexts right like we should be thinking about that here in the United States as well as elsewhere um I want to now ask uh Eric a question and this is sort of um you know I think that we've talked a lot about we've talked about both sort of the university experience and credentialing there we've talked about you know gearbox is sort of this this uh intermediary space but I think that one of the things that we know is that you know it's it's almost like a lifelong practice right like we're learning as we move throughout our careers and especially as we as engineers as we specialize into different areas we have sort of continued learning on the job training right and I wanted to ask you about your experience but also your thoughts on are there opportunities for improving sort of early to mid-career types of opportunities you know whether that's programs like gearbox or other types of opportunities through through through companies that you know other engineers like if you were talking to another sort of you know engineer Kenyan engineer that's just entering this the workforce what types of opportunities should they be looking for um to expand their industrial experience and become you know become more experienced so what are the skills that they should be looking for basically okay maybe just to mention uh maybe just to mention the context of OPI bus I think we we started a partnership with Nita where we um where OPI bus uh their employees can just um register we can can do courses from Nita is the national industrial training authority here in Kenya where they offer different short courses just to improve the various specializations that one uh has so we we've had a partnership with them where we we as as the as the employees of OPI bus can just work in there and just do some of the courses there and at a subsidized cost just to to provide that uh platform for us to have that career growth in in the areas that we have and uh I think the other area is to invest in maybe on online platforms because this the internet is it's all I would say it's almost free because there is there is work spaces there is those places that you can just go and just maybe pay a small amount of money and just have access to the internet there is so much in the internet and I think there's not too much to read in the internet for us because and I think the the problem is now just trying to sort what what what what what adds value to you so I think uh most uh as as maybe graduates or people who are trying to navigate through their career path it's really important for them to keep an eye on those available opportunities that are there online because we just with the I think with the with the advent of with with COVID we we realize that we can almost do everything just at the comfort of our of our homes and I mean we are almost that three people just attending a session and I think that's something we we really need to tap into and also another thing I would mention is just as I mentioned earlier during those professional organizations like uh ebk and iak i4e I guess they're they're those points that you get by attending those sessions and I I guess it's not always just about the point it's about what the value that you get from being part of those uh those sessions because I've attended quite a number and I they have been of really great impact in my career growth because I've really learned like sometimes you may take a long path before you you understand something but by attending such sessions you are able to be guided by people who've gone earlier in their career in their careers and they are able to help you navigate through that so I guess and also the idea of of uh just um partnering with the with the institutions I think that's something that uh institutions really need to help maybe people who are trying to navigate through their careers I think through uh partnership with institutions that we get because I've seen uh I've seen uh institutions that that just get their money through research and I think that's one key area that needs to be embraced because with money for research you are able to uh they're dwelling for certain topic or a certain area of concern that you feel need to be addressed in the engineering field and that I think we really help propagate individuals in their career paths as they navigate their career paths in engineering yeah so I okay so that's that's great Eric um and I think that uh you know you've really pointed out some of the importance of like the institutions and supporting sort of early and mid-career professionals and and sort of building those partnerships whether it's through short courses or in other ways um but also the the opportunities that maybe we have to grow our networks outside of our local local areas using sort of the the magic of what we're doing right now right so so I'm talking to you and I'm learning lots of stuff so I'm building my knowledge um and so yeah the the internet has helped me today and I think that you know this is just a great example of what we're able to do um given the time it's interesting I want to thank all the panelists personally for the amount that I have learned uh today about what is happening and I'm sorry that we couldn't get to to everybody's questions but you know we are here as a network and we're going to continue this dialogue I want to turn it now back over to Kamani just to have a final word of of wrapping this up and and closing us out today so Kamani thank you thank you Jesse for um I'm really thinking that question and answers and I think has been very helpful thank you all for uh very much for attending this seminar this is all we could manage for the to accommodate with the time given we will however hope that this conversation can continue beyond this follow we'll share some of the questions with the panel for further action and the response for more questions email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and don't forget to become an e-force member to get uh info on upcoming webinars seminars and other events at www.engineeringforchange.org uh stroke sign up also sign up for our new event on this upper second at www.impactengineering.org we look forward to seeing you in our future events bye bye quahere asante thank you bye bye bye thank you everyone