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At the end of 2013, I met in Cambridge with Thierry Zomahoun and Arun
Sharma.
The University of Cambridge has been proudly involved with AIMS from
the very beginning its good to see Neil Turok and colleagues here.
Now, over two years later, the convening power of this gathering has
surpassed my expectations.
How many more doctors and nurses, how many more crop scientists
and computer programmers, does the continent require not to
develop its full potential, but sometimes even to cover its essential
needs?
Recent data from Senegal suggests that fewer than 5% of the countrys
young people attend universities. The pattern is similar in most of West
Africa.
In Ethiopia, around 13% of young people attend higher education better
than West Africa, but still far behind the 30% global average for
university enrolment.
The bad news for those governments is this: you have to do both.
In Zambia girls are more than twice as likely as boys to drop out during
primary school. Among those who stay on until grade 5, 25% of the
poorest boys will pass the national maths assessment but only 16% of
the poorest girls.
We dont know how many of the thousands of children that came along
will enter careers in plant sciences or mathematics as a result of their
exposure.
Indeed research from the University of York and the Wellcome Trust
suggests that in the UK the decision to pursue science as a career is
established between the ages of 9 to 11!
This outreach, run on a mostly voluntary basis, is one very simple way in
which one university can contribute to meeting the future demand for
skills in STEM subjects.
But universities have an even more fundamental role, far beyond
sparking young peoples appetites for science.
Of course, universities offer todays youth the knowledge and the skills
they will need to enter the workforce.
So we must educate our graduates not just for the jobs that exist today,
but for the challenges that will exist in the future.
The over 1600 companies developed with 60,000 jobs for the 600,000
people (less than 1% of the U.K. population) who live in the vicinity of
our city create more than 13bn for the UK.
This is what every government that is impatient for societal benefit wants
to hear.
There are few short cuts that have not been already tried.
The minister initiating such an effort will never see personal political
benefit of the investment.
And if you are not prepared for long term investment then maybe you
need to think hard as to why engage with this agenda at all.
We are setting out on a difficult road that scientists and policy makers
must travel together.
A fine name, in honour of a fine scientist, who would surely have given
his full support to what we are trying to achieve together.
I say that, not because our aspirations are too low but because they
should be much higher.
I was reminded only a few days ago that, while Einstein was the sole
author of the paper predicting gravitational waves, the recent scientific
paper confirming the detection of those waves had more than 1000
authors from around the world.
The complexity, the scale, and the urgency of the challenges demand
that we work together and collaboration is the name of the game.
They have enhanced their prospects for promotion, and have inserted
themselves into an international network of scientific collaboration.
They gained the skills needed in the lab and published well, but also
acquired indispensable tools required in research management.
These are men and women primed for scientific leadership.
We work closely with almost 100 African research partners from Accra
to Cape Town.
We will continue to work with existing and are very open to new
partners to contribute solutions to the problems faced by people in
Africa, and beyond.
She was in her 35th week, and presented some unusual symptoms,
including an accumulation of fluid in the lungs.
She was only diagnosed correctly when the intensive care physician
remembered talking to an obstetric anaesthetist who had just returned
from Mulago Hospitals maternity ward, in Kampala one of Africas
busiest.
There, the anaesthetist had learned that the most common presentation
of pre-eclampsia in Uganda is pulmonary oedema leading to respiratory
failure.
Thank you.