Need for Indo-Kenyan relations stressed

By Our Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, NOV. 25. There was the need to explore the possibility of India and Kenya forging a fruitful partnership and promoting a functionally working relationship with a view to create a strategic alliance in priority areas of the concerns of both the countries, suggested Prof.Thomas R. Odhiambo, President of the African Academy of Sciences, Nairobi, Kenya.

Africa has been looking forward to collaborating with Indian universities, research centres and R and D institutions in fields of mutual interest, he added.

He was delivering the Eighth Rajiv Gandhi Science and Technology Lecture on the "Science scenario in Africa: Preparing for a quantum jump", at the Sri Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Science and Technology at Thiruvananthapuram, this evening.

The lecture series, launched by the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies under the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, New Delhi, was organised here by the Regional Research Laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

The United Nations-led development, financed by the World Bank, the African Development bank and a plethora of aid agencies and largely staffed by external experts, has not only led to stagnation or worse, but also deprived Africa of the leadership role in her own development, Prof.Odhiambo alleged.

The challenge for the African science and technology leadership was to focus all their trained minds, for the next four decades, on the eradication of poverty through creation of wealth and through the creation of opportunities for all people in Africa to adopt a productive, dignified livelihood and to get rid of endemic hunger, malnutrition and tropical diseases. However, the crisis of poverty in Africa was so great and so pervasive that only a radical strategy for its removal was feasible, Dr. Odhiambo observed.

"Africa's future lies in heavy, long-range investment in the development of brain power in terms of life-long learning, in enhancement of skills and in institutional paradigm shift designed to open up economic opportunities through solution- oriented R and D, as well as in heavy, continuing social investment in the development of the spiritual dimensions of the African persona to come to intimately know the self," he said.

As a radical strategy aimed at the science-led development of Africa, Dr. Odhiambo has suggested that the indigenous knowledge and technology systems be adopted as the foundational bedrock on which African communities could graft the new knowledge emerging from problem-solving scientific research and technology development. It was also imperative that a proactive working relationship be cultivated among S and T leadership, community leadership and the business and industrial sectors, he maintained.

Eventhough Ms.Sonia Gandhi, the Chairperson of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, was to preside over the function, she could not make it and Dr.S.Raha, Secretary of the Foundation, read out her speech `in absentia.'

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