BY Andualem Sisay
The Ethiopian Science and Technology Minister, Junedin Sado advised African countries to choose copying technology instead of killing their time in basic research.
Opening the conference that gathered over 400 scientists and researchers from various African countries, the Minister indicated that Ethiopia strongly believes in acquiring science and technology via copy like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and China did a few decades ago. “Why do we kill our time in the so called ‘basic research’ while others have already developed the technology?”, he asked.

“The call of the time for us is to acquire these technologies via copy”, he said admitting that many thinkers, leaders and academia do not accept the idea.
Thus, creating conducive environment for building capacity in technology copying, assimilation, adoption, adaptation, improving parts and finally reverse engineering are mandatory before going to frontier technologies via basic research, according to the minister.

The conference entitled, The First session of the Committee on Development Information, Science and Technology (CODIST), discusses on how African countries build knowledge economy, which is based on science and technology.

Mr. Abdoulie Janneh, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in his statement presented by his representative also shared the Ministers statement. “Research and development (R&D) is not the only ingredient in the production of economically useful knowledge or innovative capacities. It has to be emphasized that innovation also comes from learning, experimentation and re-use of knowledge and not always from the discovery of entirely new technical or scientific principles,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Janneh stressed that African countries should increase their investment on science and technology. African leaders have agreed to commit 1% of their GDP for R&D by the year 2010.

Studies show that compared to other continents, Africa lags behind in many aspects of science and technology development and utilization. For instance, Internet penetration of the continent is still very low with only 5.6% rate compared to Asia 17.2, Middle East 23.3% and Europe 48.9%. Cell phone penetration in Africa is only 6.6%. Such gaps are challenging Africa from becoming beneficiary of international trade that requires e-commerce, according to Mr. Janneh.

Some of the papers presented at the conference indicated that in order to develop science and technology, Africa needs to solve the lack of leadership and needs to commit itself to investment consistently for a long time in R&D.