By Kellys Kaunda
HICHILEMA PROMISES INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY – WHAT IS AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY?
Ambassador Anthony Mukwita and I once visited the Technical School of Allen in Stuttgart, Germany, the home of Mercedes Benz.
We saw the 4G industry in progress powered by smart factories.
Here, data is fed into computers which serves as instructions to the assembly line to manufacture what it has been instructed.
Whether you manufacture shoes, motor vehicles, bottles, etc, the assembly line will do just what the data fed into the computer will do.
Here, every student is sponsored by a company or the German government.
The courses are designed by industry which in turn supplies lecturers who are employees of the sponsoring company.
The students shuttle between class and the companies that sponsored them.
When they complete, they go to work for their sponsors. If they choose to go and work elsewhere, they are obliged to pay back their sponsor over a specified period of time.
This link with industry is intended to ensure the student doesn’t end up failing to find a job relevant to what he or she studied.
This way, the money spent on education doesn’t go to wate.
Industrial universities are essentially institutions of higher learning with a strong emphasis on engineering programs.
Some of the universities in this category include: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Berkely.
There are other such universities in China, Japan and South Africa.
In Zambia, this is what the Zambia Institute of Technology, ZIT, was designed to do.
This is what the Northern Technical College, NORTEC, of Ndola was intended for.
ZIT, now Copperbelt University and NORTEC are on the Copperbelt because of easier access to multiple industries.
Currently, the University of Zambia offers engineering courses which prepare students for careers in the industrial sector.
At Secondary School level, schools like Hilcrest Technical Secondary School in Livingstone were supposed to prepare students to go into industrial-related courses for their tertiary education.
As of 2020, the Ministry of Education earmarked 15 secondary schools as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) schools.
This is intended to prepare students for industrial-related courses at college or university level.
A university specializing in courses closely related to the manufacturing sector dovetails with Zambia and Africa’s desire for value-addition and industrialization.
If Zambia can establish a world class University offering industrial courses, depending on how it markets the institution, could be the preferred destination for students from different parts of Africa.
Already, we are attracting significant numbers of students from within the Southern African region.
This might as well be one of our major exports to the rest of Africa.
However, we need to talk location: Why Solwezi? While some of us are not opposed to the idea, we want to know the rationale that went into the decision about location.
Remember that apart from the mines, there are no other industries in Northwestern Province.
Government might be thinking of distributing investment across the country which is not necessarily a bad thing. Kenneth Kaunda tried this policy.
But is the decision of the location done with the interests of students at the center?
Until I hear from some of you my friends that regularly interact with me on my posts, I would rather government relocated the university much closer to where the majority of industries are to facilitate easy access.