Africa contributes less than four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet when the effects of climate change are felt, the continent often pays a disproportionate price through the loss of lives, livelihoods, and critical infrastructure.
Ghana has experienced the devastating consequences of inadequate infrastructure firsthand. The June 3, 2015 floods and fire disaster in Accra claimed more than 150 lives and exposed serious weaknesses in the city’s drainage and urban planning systems. The disaster also raised difficult questions about the adequacy of drainage infrastructure, urban planning and engineering systems in the capital.
As the world intensifies efforts to address climate change, much of the convention focuses on reducing emissions. For Africa, however, adaptation must receive equal attention. The continent needs infrastructure capable of withstanding the effects of climate change that are already being experienced. We must build the infrastructure of resilience: climate-adaptive cities, renewable energy grids, clean water systems, sustainable transport, and food security systems that can withstand the pressures already upon us. Every single one of those is an engineering challenge.
Yet we continue to produce engineers who are not equipped to solve them. We are not educating them in a way that connects their technical training to the realities of the continent they are supposed to serve. If we are serious about Africa’s global relevance and climate accountability, we must confront a deeply uncomfortable truth: Africa’s development cannot be separated from engineering. Yet, the way engineering is taught does not always equip graduates to respond to the continent’s most pressing challenges.
Where Engineering Education Falls Short
‘We are not educating our youth to solve our problems!’ This statement by Prof Fred Mcbagonluri, President of Academic City University, captures a growing concern about the gap between what engineering education produces and what African societies need.
Across much of Africa, engineering education has traditionally focused on applying established solutions. While that knowledge remains important, today’s engineers must also be able to identify unfamiliar problems, understand their social context, and develop practical solutions. They can apply formulae flawlessly.
Yet, many struggle to connect those formulae to the sociological realities of a community without clean water, the ethical dimensions of a procurement decision that affects public safety, or the human factors in a digital system designed for users who have never interacted with technology before. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of how the discipline is designed and taught.
Consider the entry requirements for engineering programmes in Ghana. They are tight, competitive, and designed to filter. Such requirements can create the impression that only students with exceptional Senior High School grades can succeed in engineering. Yet academic performance at this stage does not always reflect a student’s potential to become a competent engineer. What that assumption misses is that a well-structured introductory engineering education can bring far more students into the pipeline than our current system allows. The gate should be rigorous competence, not prior privilege.
The engineers who will one day design and build flood-resilient drainage systems for communities in Accra, develop affordable solar microgrids for rural areas in the Northern Region, or turn agricultural waste in the Ashanti Region may already be among today’s students. They may be students with low grades in Elective Mathematics or Physics. We are selecting for a narrow band of prior achievement and then wondering why our engineering talent pool is insufficient to meet our massive infrastructure deficit.
What Engineering Education Should Deliver
Real engineering problems, from climate adaptation to digital infrastructure, do not respect disciplinary boundaries. A good engineering education must reflect this reality. It must scaffold learning, building from guided exploration to collaborative application to independent mastery. It must be grounded in context, using case studies and problems that are recognisable and meaningful to the students being taught.
In an African context, engineering ethics cannot be a standalone module to be endured; it must be the lens through which every design decision is examined. Engineering students should study landmark international cases such as the Challenger disaster and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But they should examine African experiences including June 3 floods in Accra, Cape Town’s water crises and the use of drones to deliver medical supplies in Ghana. Our students need to see that engineering failure and engineering innovation both happen across this continent, in conditions they recognise, with consequences that affect people like them.
These ideas also inform a textbook I am co-authoring with Professor McBagonluri, An Introduction to Engineering: A Project-Based Approach, which seeks to introduce students to engineering through practical projects and real-world problems, particularly within the African context.
Preparing Engineers for Africa’s Future
There is a recurring conversation in education policy circles about ‘training for the jobs of the future.’ It is usually framed around digital skills, artificial intelligence, and data literacy. These are real and important. But they are not sufficient.
The jobs that Africa needs over the next quarter century will not be limited to digital technologies. The continent will need people capable of designing and building power plants, water treatment facilities, road networks, hospitals, affordable housing, irrigation systems, ports, and manufacturing facilities.
These are the foundations of an economy capable of adding value to Africa’s resources rather than exporting raw materials and importing finished products.
Engineering is central to many of Africa’s development priorities. You cannot have a digital economy without electrical and computer engineers. You cannot have an energy transition without mechanical, chemical, and environmental engineers. You cannot have climate resilience without civil, environmental, and systems engineers. You cannot have trade and regional integration without the logistics, transport, and manufacturing infrastructure that engineers design and build.
When done right, engineering education provides a transferable way of thinking: problem framing, systems thinking, evidence-based decision-making, ethical reasoning, and the discipline to iterate until a solution actually works. These habits of mind are exactly what our public and private sectors need, not just in engineering roles, but in policy, governance, and business leadership.
The Urgency of Now
The urgency is clear. Climate Change will not wait. Neither will Africa’s infrastructure needs or the aspiration of its young population. The demographic dividend of Africa’s young population does not wait. Every year that we train engineers who are not equipped to solve African problems, and every year that we exclude capable students from engineering pathways because our entry systems are too narrow, is a year we cannot recover.
Africa’s development and industrialisation will depend, in part, on the quality of its engineers. That means rethinking how engineering is taught, connecting technical knowledge with the realities of African communities and giving students opportunities to solve real problems from the beginning of their education.
The challenge is not simply to produce engineers. It is to produce engineers equipped to build the resilient, innovative and industrialised Africa the continent needs.