Without playing any holier than thou what really should horrify us is that Botswana, a country with less than 2 million people is way ahead Zim with more than 12 million people. This is all about leadership. Botswana has planned and implemented an innovation hub, UB has more than 20 professors, Microsoft Innovation Center is located here, they have two national universities and three private ones, their systems of funding local entrepreneurs (read software developers) is very transparent, the University of Botswana is ranked higher than Zim universities (at least in 2011) etc. Problem with Zim is that we are too big headed to learn from neighbors, except South Africa. My guess is that Zambia and Namibia are ahead of us. What makes it more disappointing is that all the research institutions in Zim will tell you they have no money but they will operate, complete with directors, cars etc year after year. In 2008 I did a Public Private Partnership (PPP) with a Zim research institute and was robbed in broad daylight when the director demanded that the proceedings from the prototype we developed be shared equally among some of his staff who had done very little on the project. My plea that we reserve some of the money for further developing the prototype was dismissed. The result is I am still struggling to fund the commercializing of the prototype though the proof of concept was demonstrated and accepted by the research project we did with that university. And I know a colleague who has a very useful nano tech water purification prototype and has been allocated 20 000 US to build a plant to purify Khami water. There simply is no institutional support for R and D in ZIm and if this continues then we are likely to drop off the list.
↧