The robots from Senegal

One statement is true about technology: No country was born with it or has perpetual monopoly on it; not Germany, UK, the US, Korea, Japan, or wherever. This fact seems to be playing out big time in Senegal, the otherwise impoverished, French-colonised, West African state of 15 million people. With a few facilitators: God Bless them-Senegal is bucking the trend in Africa by putting so much emphasis on hands-on technology and creating awesome ways to technologically educate our teens, with special emphasis on girls and women.

In this wise, I doff my hat for Dr. Sidy Ndao, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA, for his efforts in sharing his passion on technology with secondary school students in Senegal. Ndao, who himself is Senegalese, is on a mission to get science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, better known by the acronym “STEM” engrained in the DNA of African pupils, starting from Senegal. How refreshing. Ndao has observed that schools in Senegal sometimes emphasised rote memorisation rather than focusing on contextual learning. “Students do not connect theories they learn with practical experiences,” he argued.

Articulating his vision, Ndao believes that, in Senegal and across West Africa, incorporating STEM education can help set a course to improve everything: from sanitation systems to agriculture and can create jobs in a place with soaring unemployment. According to the New York Times, “In Senegal, entrepreneurs and government officials are embracing the idea of improving STEM education. A technology hub under construction in a new city being built outside Dakar will contain training and research facilities. Coding clubs for girls and women are popping up in the country and across the region.”

Ndao has organised a yearly robotics competition dubbed PanAfrican Robotics Competition, or PARC. The contest, which is highly competitive and involves students from more than 20 schools in Senegal alone, is a vital component of Ndao’s project, which has enjoyed some financial support from UNESCO, the US Embassy in Senegal, University of Nebraska, The World Bank, and Dakar American University of Science and Technology, to name a few. This is how New York Times describes one scene during one of the robotics competition: “So when the robot built by students from an all-girls school finally navigated the twists of the maze, flawlessly rounding every corner and touching every required flag, the crowd went nuts.” This is obviously very mesmerising.

Needless to say robots are playing a crucial role in advanced manufacturing and leading manufacturing countries of the world, including Germany, Japan, Korea, China, and the US. These countries are replacing humans with robots in many of their critical real-life manufacturing tasks. So far, Africa has been excluded from this club for the most part, but the high school students in Senegal would like to change that.

For five days at the (PARC) competition camp, boys and girls from sixth grade to high school “hunched over laptops and tablets, entering codes to guide their small blue robots through a labyrinth meant to test their skills in a competition on the final day.

“At the camp, students built robots from a kit, learned to programme them and then created models of farms of the future that incorporated uses for their robots. At the camp, a team planned to use its robot for weed removal.” One team created a robot with a fan that could monitor temperatures and better still cool crops in desertlike heat. Another team will use its robot for weed removal. These are obviously pretty awesome projects. 25 schools, all from Senegal, reportedly participated in PARC 2016, the second year in the competition.

PARC 2017 took place barely a week ago from May 18 to 20, 2017, in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The reports are not out yet. However, this time around, other countries from Africa were expected to participate, and the countries are divided into three regions: Region 1 (Senegal, Morocco, Gambia and Ivory Coast), Region 2 (Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Kenya), and Region 3 (South Africa, Niger and the Africa Diaspora).

PARC 2017 challenges students to devise solutions for increasing Africa’s manufacturing and processing capacity of foods and goods using science and technology.

Against the traditional expectations that basically says girls should not aim too high, especially in the largely Muslim Senegal, girls have front seats in Ndao’s robot projects. The all-girls school at PARC 2016 competition, the Mariama Bâ de Gorée School, is known as one of the best mathematics schools in Senegal.

This robot cum STEM programme in Senegal is changing the lives of our children. Arame Coumba Dieng, a student at Lycee de Thiaroye in Dakar, is famously referred to in her school as Miss Mathematics. Dieng says she has taken to serious coding and professed her love of mathematics. Undoubtedly, we need more Ndaos in Africa. God Bless him.