Africa can't progress without Maths and Science - expert

Dr. Wilfred Ndifon, the Chairman of the Career Development Research, AIMS-Ghana and South Africa, has said a Mathematical thinking is requisite for understanding the African problem and for developing institutions to use specific logical solutions to address them.

“Many of Africa's problems that impede its development are inherently Mathematical in their structure and dynamics,” Dr. Ndifon said this at the opening ceremony of a two-week Computing in Applied Mathematical Sciences (CAMS) Workshop for African Mathematics students, at Cape Coast.

He, however, expressed worry about the low level of interest Africans show in Mathematics and Science.

He, therefore, called for a higher commitment to the promotion of the subjects and a higher level of awareness to be created among African Parliamentarians and public officials to sustain their interest in Mathematical Sciences.

The workshop, organised by the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS-Ghana) in partnership with the Government of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the American Government’s Office of Naval Research (ONR), is being attended by 30 Mathematical students from 10 countries.

Dr Ndifon explained that the workshop would, therefore, focus on the African problem whose solutions required sophisticated computer software development principles and would provide a natural medium where such thinking would be expressed.

It is geared towards bringing together individuals interested in applying both Computing and Mathematical thinking to solve specific problems with relevance to Africa’s development challenges.

Professor Emmanuel Kwame Essel, the Director of Academics, AIMS-Ghana, said the participants would be giving expert coaching to gain experience so that they could work on a problem of their own chosen communities.

He tasked the participants to identify some small-scale enterprises that were doing things inefficiently and use their computational knowledge to help them.

Some participants who spoke to the Ghana News Agency praised AIMS-Ghana for such an initiative and said that the workshop would be of a great benefit to the African continent.