The "Engineers Week" initiated by the Association of DR Congo Engineers (ACIC) [1] provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the role of this profession, in the wake of the call for "revolution and modernity" launched by the authorities.
Despite the distractions caused by fabricated rebellions in Eastern Congo that the government must confront head on, the reconstruction of the nation needs to proceed. The reconstruction or actually the construction of DR Congo urgently requires, among other actors, good quality engineers and scientists in a variety of fieds and in high numbers. Taking advantage of the massive investments pouring in, the country should primarily count on the internal supply of engineers and also on the diaspora where a number of practicing engineers/scientists and scholars live. A database of those should be established and maintained.
When looking at the current numbers first, the country is barely producing enough engineers to address the demands in mining, construction, transportation, telecoms, water...to name a few sectors. How can this vast country undertake the major challenge of reconstruction with so few key actors?
The two major engineering schools in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi barely produce 40 senior engineers (6 years degree) per year in the traditional fields of Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, Electronics, Chemical, Material and Mining. Adding about five schools training intermediate (3-4 years) engineers in those same areas, the country barely hits the level of 200 engineers per year. Diversification of the engineering fields to include more vital needs is also urgently required as well as the increase of the number of engineers produced. It would be normal to expect an output of about 5000 engineers or more per year in a country the size of Congo.
Alongside the quantity, the nation needs to stress on the quality of its engineering graduates by updating the curricula and also recycling the engineers by exposing them to advanced technologies. It is a good trend to see the emergence of Excellence Centers like the recently opened Chinese IT Huawey that will train and update telecom personnel to address the growing needs in this area. More of these are vey much needed in various fields. Vital needs including rail transportation, naval construction, food processing industry etc...are absent from the curriculum. The existing orientations are pretty much still reflecting the colonial legacy and need to be revamped to respond to the challenges posed by the rebuilding of the nation. With the nation being an easy target of so many looters and predators, authorities must integrate engineering defense systems, at the very least to ensure territory surveillance.
When more engineering schools are needed, more faculty will also be required and policies must be in place to fill these gaps. The country still very much relies on old cooperation agreements to train very few engineering faculty abroad or in "sandwich programs", part abroad and part locally. In this area, it seems Lubumbashi is doing much better than Kinshasa where the training of replacement faculty is lagging and no incentives are in place to recall the alumnae throughout the world.
Bold actions are needed to train more engineering teaching personnel. Solely Engineering and Technology Universities (in the model of the German Technical University system) need to be created to train high level graduate engineering students (PhD/MSc) at first, with faculty recruited from the various existing engineering schools in the Congo but also abroad. It is good practice to begin with one such Engineering University in Kinshasa or Lubumbashi. Training PhDs in separate schools will spread thin the effort with little results to show. A new kind of cooperation should be geared towards the acquistion of advanced lab equipment and facilities for brand new engineering schools and for the upgrade of existing schools while ensuring connection to the world.
With so few advanced engineering personnel and actors, the country will be unable to take the major leap needed for its take-off in order to place itself in the 'emerging nations club' orbit any time soon.
[1] http://radiookapi.net/emissions-audio/2012/06/05/antoine-mesu-parle-de-la-place-de-lingenieur-civil-dans-lindustrialisation-de-la-rdc/
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