Significance Of The Basic Sciences In The Socio-Economic Development of Africa

Abstract

The basic sciences, e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics are the building blocks so to speak of all the applied sciences of agriculture, food science, energy, medicine, pharmacy, engineering and telecommunications, to name a few.  The pioneering discoveries by some trail blazers such as Louis Pasteur who developed the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax point to the significance of the basic sciences to the socio-economic development of any country or continent. Pasteur invented a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurisation. As Alexander Fleming said “I certainly did not plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer but that was what happened. Constatin Fahlberg, a Russian Chemist, discovered saccharin, an artificial sweetener on. How did I discover saccharin?” he said. “Well, it was partly by accident and partly by study”. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry gave the first indication of climate change in 1896 through his calculations of how doubling the levels of concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would increase the mean temperature by 5-60C on earth. Some of the challenges facing teaching and learning of basic sciences in Africa include lack of interest by students in the secondary schools, inadequate teachers, facilities and equipment and lack of political will by governments to commit the required funds to the study of the basic sciences. Stakeholders, especially governments, can help create the conducive environment for basic science education in Africa by first training a critical mass of teachers to teach the basic sciences, providing state of the art laboratories with the relevant equipment, and creating schemes and the conducive environment to encourage the younger generation to study the basic sciences.