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Engineering ecosystems: A conceptual framework for research and
training in sub-Saharan Africa
Mike Klassen, University of Toronto, CANADA, mike.klassen@utoronto.ca;
Matthew L. Wallace*, International Development Research Centre, CANADA, mwallace@idrc.ca
Abstract
We introduce a novel conceptual framework for thinking about engineering in Sub-Saharan Africa,
which is applied to ongoing examples of five funded programs targeting engineering ecosystem change
in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya. We argue for an ecosystem approach, building on ideas from
the sociology of professions, focusing in particular on the role of institutions in setting jurisdictions and
the linked ecologies of professions and universities. Broadly speaking, the framework focuses on the
interactions between a range of engineering-related institutions from the education sector and beyond,
sheds light on links between higher education policy and innovation policy, and re-examines the role
of university curricula. The main contribution of the framework is to inform multidisciplinary
scholarship that links engineering education to development outcomes through skills-building and
technology development. It also aims to shed light on strategies for scaling up the implementation of
capacity-building programs in the field.
Keywords: education policy, innovation policy, engineering profession, sub-Saharan Africa, ecosystem
model, sociology of professions, engineering education
1.0 Introduction
There are mounting calls for enabling engineering to play a greater role in the socio-economic
development of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (UNESCO, 2010; Mohamedbhai, 2015). In
recent years, both UNESCO and the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO)
have argued that engineering is uniquely positioned to contribute to the UN Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) – from water to energy to infrastructure, not to mention
agricultural technologies to support food security and biomedical technologies to reduce the
burden of disease. The wide range of engineering disciplines each offer valuable knowledge
and expertise that when properly mobilized can improve the quality of life. This ultimate goal
has a fairly broad consensus behind it. However, the question of how to stimulate change, with
what mix of actors, is very much up for debate.
Policy makers, donors, and educational institutions demand that Africa increase the quantity
and quality of graduates by changing the curricula of university programs, building links to
industry for R&D and work-integrated learning, strengthening regulation of professional
practice, encouraging global firms to develop local procurement of engineering services, and
revamping quality assurance systems for engineering education. Each of these changes requires
time, resources and crucially the attention of key organizations. Countries can easily end up
with a confusing mix of duplication in some policy domains, gaps in others, and fatigue of the
crucial local leaders and organizations. Understandably, individual stakeholder groups can end
up arguing for change in their sphere of its expertise, without a clear picture of how the whole
system fits together. This represents a practical coordination problem for organizations
working to change conditions on the ground, as well as a conceptual challenge for researchers
and policymakers in thinking about the complex system that is the field of engineering in Sub-
Saharan Africa.
This paper introduces a novel conceptual framework for thinking about engineering in Sub-
Saharan Africa, to help researchers and change initiators to analyze systemic challenges and
coordinate efforts. The framework comes out of, and is applied to, five ongoing projects
targeting engineering ecosystem change in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya. The
framework is based on the experiences and reflections of a funder and consultant engaged in
the process of project development.
We argue for an ecosystem approach, building on ideas from the sociology of professions
(Dingwall, 2016), in particular the role of institutions in setting jurisdictions and the linked
ecologies of professions and universities (Abbott, 2005). This type of approach has been found
to be very useful in analyzing the profession of engineering (Ressler, 2011). It highlights the
interconnectedness and interdependency among actors, while focusing on the agency of
individuals and organizations within the system. It allows us to connect two important strands
of literature: (i) curriculum development in higher education, which focuses on skills
(Heywood, 2005), and (ii) innovation policy/systems, which focus on skills as well as the
behaviour of firms and public R&D funding and performing institutions (Borras & Edquist,
2014; Niosi et al., 1995).
The paper is laid out as follows. First, we briefly introduce the funding organization and the
five funded projects under the banner of Strengthening Engineering Ecosystems in Sub-
Saharan Africa, and explain the collective process taken to conceptualize the projects and
support project leaders in thinking about their work. This serves as an account of our methods
for developing the framework in an iterative fashion. Second, we explain the ecosystem
framework using a visual model, an exploration of the relationships between elements, and
highlighting key ‘interdependencies’ that can be critical when understanding the landscape of
engineering in Africa. Finally, we demonstrate how the framework can be applied to a few
types of specific issues, and suggest lines of inquiry for future research.
2.0 Methods/Approach
This paper arises out of work funded by the International Development Research Centre
(IDRC). In 2017, we undertook a consultation process to understand the opportunities for
supporting innovative projects in engineering in sub-Saharan Africa. This started with a review
of academic and policy literature on higher education, professions and engineering, globally
and in Sub-Saharan Africa. We also conducted informal interviews with more than a dozen
leading scholars and policymakers – these were not recorded, so no detailed transcripts were
available for analysis, but key notes were taken.
The findings of this review revealed significant and deep challenges facing engineering
education and industry in many African countries, in multiple overlapping sub-systems: higher
education policy, industry and professional bodies, and universities themselves. The review
suggested funding coordinated interventions at multiple points that could lead to more
sustained or widespread change in the wider profession than work with individual
organizations or subsystems. Two suggestions for ‘upward cycles’ were: (i) Engaging industry
to articulate challenges that can be articulated through research that generates publications,
builds the research capacity of Ph.D students and postdoctoral fellows, and encourages a
culture of collaborative inquiry in engineering research; and (ii) Investing in academics to
improve teaching quality while building accreditation systems that evaluate and reward these
capacities, with buy-in from both academics and industry representatives to address
employability challenges.
Ultimately, we synthesized the insights from this consultation process into a preliminary
‘model’ for engineering ecosystems. This model was used to frame an open call for proposals
from organizations and consortiums to propose innovative projects that create systemic change
in local engineering ecosystems
1
. Five projects, led by consortia of universities, policy
organizations and industry partners, were selected by an expert panel in 2018: two from
Tanzania, one from Kenya, one from Nigeria, and one from Ghana. They range in focus:
supporting STEM research cultures; building capacity and supporting innovations in water
engineering; and product design and work-integrated learning in the engineering curriculum.
Several projects directly target change inside universities such as through new research
personnel, improved undergraduate teaching, and experimental industry partnerships; while
others aim for change in company hiring practices or national educational policy for
engineering.
In late 2018, we facilitated a workshop with project leaders and leading donor organizations,
policymakers and academics from engineering and higher education. Initially, the framework
was presented and participants were invited to ask questions, and make suggestions for
additional elements that should be added, or for changes to the wording or representation of
key concepts. Later, project leaders were invited to map their own organizations and change
projects onto the framework and identify assumptions about the relationships between key
actors. This revealed some patterns that are discussed in the section on applications. Ultimately,
it led to improvements in the framework, the culmination of which is presented in the next
section.
3.0 The Framework
3.1 The ‘ecosystem’ analogy to understand engineering
For several decades, scholarship in many social fields on metaphors has drawn from the natural
sciences, in particular from physics and biology (Tsoukas, 1988; Mirowski, 1989). Metaphors
are not only a tool for communicating a given concept; they also shape our fundamental
understanding of it. Currently, the term ecosystem is used to describe a wide range of social,
technical and organizational arrangements of actors (human and non-human), rather than the
traditional notion of a biological community with multiple levels of interactions. Often it
simply denotes interconnectedness or an ensemble that is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’. It
has been used in the context of professions to examine the taxonomy of occupations, and
division of labour, for instance (Dingwall, 2016). However, in this case, we expand the analogy
to describe the way institutional actors with a common stake in the field of engineering interact.
It denotes the importance of a diversity of actors and policies, highlights the existence of
multiple levels within ‘hierarchies’ of individual relationship (from vocational training to high-
level policy development to international agreements) and points to both ‘top-down’ and
‘bottom-up’ interventions that affect the system.
1
The call for proposals featured two streams: one for major industrial partnerships (research chairs); the other
for smaller scale ecosystem change projects. This framework presented in this paper relates to both, but
focuses on the latter.
Most importantly, the idea of an ecosystem points to the need for adaptive management by
policymakers in seeking to improve the ecosystem by recognizing the fundamental existence
of trade offs and interdependencies without necessarily knowing all the parameters involved
(actors, feedback loops, etc.). Adaptive management was developed as an approach to mitigate
this uncertainty in the conservation of natural environments by examining the results of small
interventions. This is essentially learning by doing (Walters, 1986). We propose to adopt this
model in order to affect, and understand, change in how the various actors and stakeholders
increase or decrease the real or perceived ‘mismatch’ between the research and training of
engineers on the one hand, and the demands of users (e.g., in civil society, government and the
private sector).
This particular ecosystem model focuses on engineering as not only a discipline, but also a
professional group with a particular expertise anchored in common training approaches. This
provides some of the linkages that are found amongst the institutions that are represented.
While the profession of ‘engineer’ may be concentrated in a few firms, government agencies
and university departments, it is highly heterogeneous in terms of the functions, roles and
objectives of the individuals or units (e.g., departments) that dominate it. Furthermore, the
jurisdictional boundaries of this profession are contested and fluid. Firms, universities and
other organizations may or may not rely on engineering and engineers, as opposed to other
forms of expertise and experts, to accomplish a given goal. Most importantly, professions
evolve alongside each other, hence the focus on interdependencies in the system, and the need
to focus on the interaction between engineering and various types of policymaking,
management, entrepreneurship, craftsmanship and teaching, among other activities. How
engineers interact with other groups are the primary entry points into ‘strengthening’ the
ecosystem as a whole (see Section 3.3 below).
Figure 1 shows a visual representation of the engineering ecosystem framework. This section
will explain the key elements and their relationships before introducing the educational
institutions, industries, and other key actors. We attempt to highlight a few of the key elements
that pertain to the profession of engineering, and use these descriptions as a means to reconcile
various strands of literature, while beginning to identify how this generic model can apply to
the sub-Saharan African context.
3.2 The main elements of an ecosystem in the Global South
This section outlines the main components of the ecosystem in some detail, as a means to define
the types of parameters that should be considered both for refining our understanding of
engineering, and for developing concrete programming in this space.
Figure 1: Engineering ecosystem framework. The arrows represent examples of influence, funding
and information flows. The shapes are for visualization purposes only – they do not represent
categories or typologies.
3.2.1 Policy environments
The set of boxes at the top of Figure 1 represent the global and national policies that shape the
engineering profession in any given African country. The three strands of national policy are
(i) higher education, technical education and research policy; (ii) science, technology and
innovation policy; and (iii) industrial policy. These shape the conditions for educational
institutions including funding and tuition, as well as the laws and regulations for competition
and intellectual property, among other important functions. Intersections between these policy
domains include the positioning of engineering (particularly sub-fields such as water
engineering or bio-engineering) as key priorities for national development, which could affect
the conditions for local firms to grow and expand as well as for local universities to create new
programs or grow enrolments for existing ones.
Particularly in smaller countries in sub-Saharan Africa, there are often no clear distinctions
between the three types of policies, and organizations that dominate them. For example,
innovation agencies rarely exist as standalone organizations, and science granting councils are
often absorbed into specific ministries or lack the funds or internal capacity to achieve their
objectives autonomously. At a ministerial level, science, industry and higher education may
not exist as separate entities. This reinforces the need to investigate the ‘contested boundaries’
of fields such as engineering, and the need to better understand complex policy levers that
affect research, training and the profession itself.
There are also laws and regulations specific to the engineering profession that sit underneath
these three broad domains. This refers to legislation that would designate engineering as a semi-
autonomous professional group with some delegated power of self-governance. As indicated
visually, such legislation provides the statutory basis for a professional body (sometimes called
professional engineering institution) which sets the criteria for individuals to be registered as
an engineer, as well as the processes for accrediting educational programs that qualify
engineers to be able to apply for registration in the first place. The issue of engineering
accreditation is a major topic of debate and research globally in engineering education (Case,
2016; Patil & Gray, 2009; Volkwein, Lattuca, Harper, & Domingo, 2007), and is also central
to developing trust in the quality and relevance of engineering education in African countries.
Not all countries in Africa currently have such legislation in place, and some may have passed
legislation without any real enforcement. The latter issue was explored in the workshop through
an interesting comparison of Ghana and Uganda – the former having only recently developed
legislation and created a professional body; while the latter has had the laws and regulations in
place for decades, but only recently has moved to enforce them.
3.2.2 Higher education institutions
The lower left-hand quadrant of Figure 1 depicts higher education institutions as one of the key
organizational fields of activity for engineering. All of the projects supported in this initiative
are either led by a university, or involve in-depth partnerships with one or more universities as
part of their approach. This part of the ecosystem is often the primary focus of much
engineering education research – the teaching and learning that takes place in classrooms or
laboratories in individual institutions. We have distinguished between two institutional types –
Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions and Universities. This
reflects the importance of coherence and differentiation in the educational offerings, and the
problem of an oversupply of engineering degree graduates relative to diplomas or lower level
qualifications.
For each type of institution, we have acknowledged the distinctly different activities and
strategies that fall under the categories of teaching, research, and industry partnerships. This
reflects the multiple roles that educational institutions play in society and the important
differences in incentives, funding structures, and even academic roles that exist between
research and teaching in particular, as well as the ‘third mission’ of universities. A myriad of
complex challenges face universities and TVET institutions in Africa: pressures to expand
enrolment while at the same time upskilling academic staff to hold PhDs; a desire to increase
research output without necessarily the time or resources or supports; and difficulties working
with the private sector due to complex bureaucracies or ‘cultural’ differences, for instance. By
representing these key actors in the wider context of the policy environment and their
relationship with civil society and industry, we hope to illuminate the prospects for different
sorts of relationships with educational institutions.
3.2.3 Industry
The lower right-hand quadrant of Figure 1 depicts Industry as a broad umbrella to capture the
activities of engineers embedded in industry sectors from ICT to water to agriculture and to
finance. A conceptual challenge with thinking about industry for engineering is that with such
a diverse and expanding range of disciplines (from the historic core of chemical, civil,
mechanical and electrical to newer disciplines such as computer, software, biomedical, and
environmental) there is no simple or homogenous definition of industry.
Rather than trying to produce an exhaustive list of specific industry sectors, we have
differentiated between global industries dominated by larger multinational firms, and local
industries, with a higher presence of smaller, local firms. This is important because of the
differences in how policy and legislation shape firm behaviour as well as how firms (local vs.
global) differ in their hiring practices with regards to engineers from African countries as
opposed to ‘expatriate’ labour. Beyond the formal sector, there was widespread agreement on
the significance of both informal sectors to engineering industry, and the major role for micro
and small enterprises in many African economies.
These are important considerations for both researchers and policymakers when thinking about
the trajectories of engineering graduates from education to work in industry, as well as the
differential impact of policies and incentives on different firms in different sectors. For
universities themselves, the nature of partnerships with small, local firms as compared to large,
global firms might take on very different dimensions. As industry panelists in our workshop
pointed out, while global firms may be comfortable with supporting more fundamental research
over longer timeframes, cash-strapped local firms are more likely to need to see a clear link
between sponsored research and their own bottom-line.
3.2.4 Donors and other key actors
There are three other types of organizations that are included in Figure 1 that don’t fit neatly
into the categories above: quality assurance agencies, civil society organizations, and donors.
These are positioned visually as important intermediaries as sources of funding, legitimacy, or
both. The first two, granting councils and quality assurance agencies, have the most direct
bearing on university and TVET institutions, as they enact and implement educational policy
and legislation and directly impact student flows, research funding, and the context in which
educators operate.
Civil society organizations are another broad umbrella category that reflect the huge array of
local and international organizations active in engineering fields in African countries. These
organizations may be supporting local communities to organize around key issues, or they may
be delivering (on a temporary or permanent basis) basic services linked to engineering such as
roads, water or sanitation. Perhaps the major similarity across this category is that they
themselves are majorly influenced by donors, the fourth category.
The presence and location of donors on the ecosystem model was a topic of significant debate
at the workshop. While some argued they fit better at the ‘top’ with international and regional
agreements, others made the point that donors have direct influence on the other organizations
involved in engineering, and should be located more centrally. They fund governments, who
in turn fund educational institutions; they provide scholarships and subsidize tuition; they fund
research infrastructure and specific projects; and they interact with industry and civil society
in a myriad of ways. From an analytical standpoint, donors have particular kinds of power and
influence which can be quite problematic. As the source of significant external resources, they
can skew behaviour and shift incentives to serve donor (as opposed to local system) priorities
(Wallace & Rafols, 2018).
3.3 Effecting change: key interdependencies and entry points
The notion of an ecosystem allows us to ‘test’ interventions in various ways, focusing on the
interactions, in order to better understand how it works and how it can be strengthened. There
are a variety of different structures and typologies of their interactions (e.g., legislation,
contracts, memoranda of understanding), but what distinguishes many countries is an under-
resourcing of many of the structures, which leads to a lack of capacity to formalize the
interactions, monitor their effectiveness and adapt them to rapidly-changing needs and
expectations.
Two possible ‘entry points’ are the boundaries and definitions of engineering itself, either in
terms of a profession and a discipline, according to where tensions or gaps exist within a given
national context. And what are the organizational structures that support each part of this
distinctive identity? This issue is particularly relevant in contexts where there is a relatively
small engineering professoriate, or where a new area of engineering is emerging. In many
countries in sub-Saharan Africa, professional engineering associations and especially
disciplinary units (e.g., departments of civil engineering) evolved from colonial institutions.
Yet inheriting these structures does not preclude the need for engineers, both within and outside
academia, to establish or uphold their expertise-based jurisdictions. This is particularly true in
contexts where there are regulatory or policy gaps in the profession. In some cases, the focus
is on jurisdictions within universities (e.g., power over curricula, hiring, etc.), while in other
cases, the issue is about the professional status of engineering graduates on the labour market.
Both of these have important implications for how curricula are developed and recognized at a
national level.
A second means to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem concerns the recognition of
graduate training. Engineering differs from many other professional fields of study in that
undergraduate training is more often the highest level of training required for relevant
employment as an expert in the field. However, the ‘reproduction of the field’ (Bourdieu, 1975)
is done by the professoriate, which is generally composed of those with graduate degrees. This
raises a few key issues. First, to what degree does the training of graduate students correlate
with the relatively low levels research output in sub-Saharan Africa, outside South Africa
(UNESCO, 2007)? Second, to what degree can African countries rely on graduate students
being trained abroad, which is relatively common, especially in the applied sciences? There is
thus a strong connection between the long-term sustainability of engineering expertise, the
availability of research resources, and graduate-level curricula.
4.0 Discussion: Applications and Practical Insights
4.1 Key features of the model
The framework itself has three salient features which distinguish it from other
conceptualizations of engineering, and that provide the basis for complex research and change
initiatives in African contexts.
First, it focuses on the interactions between a broad range of institutions with a stake in
engineering, from government ministries and quality assurance agencies to professional and
accreditation bodies, industry associations and firms themselves to universities and technical
and vocational training institutes. Other approaches may explore vertical linkages within one
policy domain, such as the relationships between government educational policy, key
intermediary organizations, and the response from schools or universities; or horizontal
linkages between different policy domains, or between the practices of educational institutions
and employing organizations. The ecosystem framework as presented here spans both these
dimensions, which may demand additional expertise or resources to undertake research, but we
believe will ultimately support more systemic and sustainable change. This foregrounds
individual and organizational networks, as well as the long-term evolution of national
communities of scholars and practitioners. It builds on studies of scientific disciplines
(Hagstrom, 1965), as well as studies of professions including a much wider range of actors than
simply professional bodies and the state (Burrage, Jarausch, & Siegrist, 1990).
Second, the interactions between different types of actors highlight funding relationships and
resource flows, as well as information flows. Systems thinking focuses more on relationships
than parts, which enables us to illuminate power structures and political economies that
dominate publicly funded research and education systems in sub-Saharan Africa, where
resources tend to be relatively scarce. Engineering is a space where industrial policy, science,
technology and innovation policy, and higher education policy interact and often must
negotiate priorities or compete for resources. The policy lens provides a powerful means to
understand incentive structures as well as opportunities for scaling-up new programs or
projects at the national or regional level. For projects, this means understanding how their
initiatives align with higher-level trends and policy directions, so that early lessons and perhaps
successful changes have a better likelihood of being taken up at other scales.
Third, the framework connects calls for increased quality assurance and improved training in
African higher education more broadly with existing mechanisms of accreditation of degree
programs by professional bodies (Matemba & Lloyd, 2017; Swanzy, 2018). The framework
puts curricula at the forefront of the negotiated spaces between jurisdictions, where many actors
seek to shape the ‘student experience’ for specific objectives such as: training the next
generation of teachers, growing the labour market in priority industrial sectors, contributing to
the growth of educational institutions, and establishing or enhancing regional or international
linkages through standardization of education. This is an important consideration for
engineering education research in Africa (and globally): many engineering academics simply
point outwards “to industry” or to national academies for justification of why curriculum
should change in particular ways. The ecosystem framework can provoke a more critical
analysis of prevailing trends in engineering education, while at the same time helping educators
to think about the differences in sectoral needs and abilities – both for hiring graduates and for
collaborating on research projects.
4.2 Practical applications
This ecosystem framework can be used to frame research questions, and to support practical
initiatives to create change. By focusing on relationships and interactions within systems
interventions can be developed to strengthen communication channels or networks, and focus
on incentive structures – from company profits to university promotional processes. It has the
potential to link high-level public policies to curricula, while considering the role of the private
sector as an employer and an innovator.
One example that is central to the five projects being funded concerns the modalities of work-
integrated learning and trying to define the ‘right’ parameters for engineering students to
perform internships in industry. Engineering has a long history of apprenticeship models of
learning and training, some of which have been lost in the move towards increased scientific
and theoretical knowledge, and the emergence of university degrees as the key qualification.
The ecosystem approach highlights the various interdependencies associated with the nature
and the length of the internships, which in turn affect the (real or perceived) quality of the
education, the professional career paths of graduates, as well as the ‘demand’ for expertise in
the labour market and the hiring practices of various firms. It also raises issues of trade-offs
between different types of work environments (some may be more relevant to the curriculum,
while others might provide broader networks) or between different lengths of internships
(longer internships may be beneficial but entail an opportunity cost for employers and students,
particularly in a low-income context). Moves to increase work-integrated learning in
universities can also be supported (or hindered) by professional accreditation requirements.
These broader considerations can help reformers inside universities think beyond the
requirements of their curriculum.
Another example of relevance to sub-Saharan Africa is how to connect craftsmanship and
employment within the informal economy with the formal skills provided by engineering
training at universities. Here technical and vocational training may be an critical part of the
ecosystem, providing new career pathways, a critical mass of technical expertise to support
advanced research and applications, as well as a ‘bridge’ to the informal economy. However,
there are significant differences in the culture and politics of TVET institutions and
universities, so it will be important to develop relationships and trust between key agents in
both types of organizations.
A third example deals with the underrepresentation of women in many engineering fields
across Africa (and around the world), which is linked to a variety of factors, including social
norms, policies to support female students and engineers (particularly at universities and higher
education institutions). It also pertains to the nature of the research and curricula in the field,
and the need to increase relevance to women and to address the ‘gendered’ nature of technology
development and learning processes. The experience of South Africa, for example, has shown
that diversity in fields such as engineering is important in terms of its broader transformative
role within society, and that high-level government policy as well as institutional policies are
needed to achieve change. Workshop participants gave examples of how professional bodies
have campaigned to increase the number of women registered as engineers through a multi-
pronged approach: electing women as leaders, reaching out to organizations to encourage
women to register, boosting the number of female academics in key universities.
A final example pertains to joint engineering applied research projects, involving both
academic and non-academic partners. In sub-Saharan Africa, data on the business expenditures
on R&D points to a chronic lack of investment from the private sector in the applied sciences,
and donor funding for research rarely addresses this concern. This type of research
programming enables students to gain experience both in university and private sector settings,
and enables instructors to better understand the needs of industry. It can demonstrate the value
that theoretical knowledge and advanced modelling can bring to industrial problems, and
develop trust and mutual understanding in the process. This type of programming, however, is
often linked to explicit innovation policies and active engagement by leading national and
international firms.
5. Conclusion: key insights and path forward
Ultimately, this framework provides a starting point for policy discussions, research programs
and program development, especially when it is used to bring together perspectives from across
the ecosystem in question. The framework can help avoid the myopia typical of any narrowly-
focused homogenous group, even if it exposes discomfort at the lack of knowledge in some
areas. It aims to inform the development of new multidisciplinary scholarship that links
engineering education to development outcomes through skills-building and technology
development. It also aims to shed light on strategies for scaling up the implementation of
capacity-building programs in the field, with a specific focus on the national and regional
contexts and political economies that dominate higher education, research and innovation in
sub-Saharan Africa (Chataway et al., 2019). The model, however, has important limitations,
for example in its ability to examine the origins and effects of dominant public narratives that
shape the engineering profession in a given country or region, as well as providing an in-depth
analytical framework for case studies at various ‘levels’ in the model.
Broadly speaking, the notion of ecosystems provides a new lens on how engineering works,
that is especially useful in sub-Saharan Africa, where the sphere of influence of local
professional engineers is often contested and where scarce resources imply the need to carefully
consider trade-offs and interventions at multiple levels. It aims to connect large-scale
‘systemic’ issues, particularly in education and innovation policy, as well as regarding the
behaviour of firms (e.g., hiring expatriate highly-skilled labour), with fundamental ideas about
the way engineering is taught and the relationships between academic engineers in universities
and practicing engineers in workplaces and professional bodies. Ecosystems imply
interconnectedness, but also the need for diversity in strengthening engineering by
‘experimenting’ with many different policies, programs, curricula, etc.
Moving forward, the five projects being supported will seek to analyze some of these
institutions and the interactions between them, as well as the experience of students and the
incentive structures that drive the main actors involved. This will ground the ‘ecosystem’
approach in on-the-ground research and training activities that go on in universities and, to a
lesser degree, other organizations such as firms and TVET institutes. Further work can
elaborate structural and contextual differences in the configuration of ecosystems in different
African countries (Case, Fraser, Kumar, & Itika, 2016). Finally, a carefully structured
comparative study could illuminate crucial similarities and differences in the strength of key
actors, the salience of key issues, and the nature of key relationships in engineering across
different national institutions.
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