[This was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education]

A new math institute leads the way in a drive to educate scholars to take on the continent's myriad problems

Kidist Zeleke used to think that her degree in mathematics wouldn't get her very far in life. She spent her time at Haramaya University, in Ethiopia, memorizing proofs and theorems, with little understanding of how such abstract concepts could be put to use in the broader world.

“In our country, if you do math or physics, the only chance you have is to be a teacher, and it's a very low-paid job,” she says with a shrug. “We only know mathematics on paper.”

And so it might have been for Ms. Zeleke, had she not been selected to participate in a new program for bright young mathematicians drawn from across the continent.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, in Cape Town, South Africa, offers one of the first working examples of a growing effort develop a cadre of highly trained, practically minded scientists and mathematicians who can solve problems in health care, agriculture, and in general mitigate the dearth of homegrown scientific research that plagues much of the continent. Educators, policy makers, and donors across Africa who are developing these programs hope they will also stem a continuing brain drain.

A second major project, the African University of Science and Technology, is scheduled to open this year in Abuja, Nigeria.

The continent desperately needs advanced scientists and mathematicians to spur its development. But most of Africa's universities have proved ill equipped to produce such expertise. Historically geared toward training civil servants rather than the researchers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers who are crucial to building a modern economy, African universities have long faced a crisis of relevance. Now they are striving to transform themselves, but the task has proved difficult. Universities have been neglected and underfinanced for decades, beset by problems as varied as low Internet connectivity, dilapidated campuses, and poorly qualified instructors.

Relevant Training

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, small in scale, offers a successful model for surmounting the obstacles, its supporters say. It admits about 50 university graduates per year from around the continent into its nine-month program. No degrees are awarded, but students take a variety of short courses, preparing them to earn advanced degrees elsewhere.

The Cape Town campus is the first in what is envisioned as 15 institutes across the continent. The African Mathematical Institutes Network, as it is called, is sponsored by the New Partnership for African Development, which is the development program of the African Union, an intergovernmental group of nations.

The network is proceeding with plans to develop four more campuses. The next one, it is hoped, will open in Abuja this August, in conjunction with the African University of Science and Technology. Others are planned for Madagascar, Sudan, and Uganda, although none has financing yet.

The math institute operates as a partnership among three South African institutions: the Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and the Western Cape, joined by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in England, and by the University of Paris-Sud XI. The project is supported by the South African government and private donors, including the Ford Foundation.

Founded in 2003 by Neil Turok, a Cambridge cosmologist long troubled by the plight of bright Africans who have been denied educational opportunities, the Cape Town campus seems an unlikely setting for a pan-African science revolution. Housed in a refurbished old hotel around the corner from the beach, in a popular surfing area called Muizenberg, the institute enrolls 53 students from 20 African countries.

Students, postgraduate tutors, and visiting lecturers - about 30 in all over the course of the year - live, eat, work, and study together. The nine-month program is divided into a series of short courses on various topics, each taught by a lecturer brought in from Europe, the United States, or, increasingly, Africa. In the final part of the program, students complete essays, working with faculty members at South African universities as advisers.

In sharp contrast to most African universities, where computers are scarce, each student here has a machine in the computer lab, with a fast Internet connection. The computers let them learn to perform complex modeling operations using free software developed in South Africa.

The courses cover a variety of topics - including quantum mechanics, climate modeling, and the Black-Scholes model, which is used for stock-market calculations - but are selected for their relevance to African needs. Most of the students who complete the courses go on to master's-degree or Ph.D. programs, typically at South African universities. The hope is that many will return to teach in their home countries.

“Even 50 well-trained students per year entering high-level science is significant, and if they become academics in Africa teaching large numbers of undergraduates and engaging in teacher training, the multiplier effect is very large,” says Mr. Turok in an e-mail message. His father, Ben, is a member of Parliament and has also been involved in the institute.

Midway through the nine-month program, Ms. Zeleke talks excitedly about the ways in which she is learning how math can be used. “Here we are trying to apply our mathematics to solve real problems,” she says. “We are learning about bioinformatics and the epidemiology of infectious diseases like HIV and malaria.” She eventually wants to return to Ethiopia and teach in a program similar to the Cape Town institute's.

A Shift in Focus

For many years, the needs of higher education have been secondary to other concerns in Africa. During the 1980s and 90s, donor agencies and national governments shifted their support to elementary and secondary education, in the belief that basic education was more critical to economic development than increasing the number of univers ity graduates.

But that view has begun to change. The first signal came in 2000 from the World Bank, which released a report, “Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise,” that recognized the key role of universities in contributing to growth and development.

That same year, four American philanthropies - the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller Foundations - pledged $150-million to strengthen African higher education, with emphases on building academic research and improving universities' capacity to train more researchers.

Countries beyond Africa - including China, India, and Brazil - have also become more involved in the continent's higher education. The Indian Institute of Technology, in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), for example, is a partner in the African Institute of Science and Technology.

At a 2005 summit of the Group of Eight, an international forum of nations representing the world's leading economies, Britain's Commission for Africa called for as much as $3-billion to be spent on centers of excellence in science and technology.

The promised support has barely started to materialize, however, in part because structures still have to be set up to make use of the funds.

Addressing the U.S. House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health last year, Calestous Juma, an African higher-education expert, identified African universities as a key area for U.S.-African cooperation and emphasized the need to support science education in particular.

“Universities in most countries are engines of development and must be so in Africa as well,” said Mr. Juma, a professor of international development in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Although resources are thin, African governments also appear more willing to support science and technology, says Linda Nordling, editor of Research Africa, a science-policy magazine based in Cape Town. “There are plenty of plans and strategies,” she says. “Ethiopia is updating its national science strategy. Rwanda is already investing. Kenya is putting science at the heart of its 2020 vision.”

In January 2007, at a summit of African Union leaders held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaders declared 2007 as the year of African science and pledged to “promote science education” by increasing their spending on scientific research and development to 1 percent of their countries' annual gross domestic product by 2010.

Most African countries currently spend less than half a percent of their GDP. The union's Consolidated Plan for African Science has been an important political force for programs like the math network.

Money Problems

Finances, however, remain a problem. The math institute, despite its support from the South African government and private foundations and donors, struggles to meet its annual budget of $800,000. And money still has to be raised for the $30-million network project.

The African University of Science and Technology, by contrast, is comparatively well financed, although the project - which initially called for the construction of four campuses, serving separate regions of Africa - has faced delays and for now is limited to the campus in Abuja.

In part to overcome the problem of limited resources, a growing number of universities, within Africa and abroad, are working together on research and degree programs. The math institute is one example. In fact, South African universities, which are better financed than most higher-education institutions in other African countries, are increasingly involved in many such linkages.

At Stellenbosch University, the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, selected as a center of excellence by the South African government in 2006, is involving researchers from other African countries in studying diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

Using the linkages model, the Carnegie Corporation recently announced a new graduate-level training program in science and engineering for African academics. It seeks to build and finance networks of universities, research institutes, and government laboratories in which universities collaborate to train and provide research opportunities for aspiring professors.

The hope of those behind many of these programs is that after students receive their Ph.D.'s, they will take their expertise back to their home countries in Africa, where it will have a ripple effect.

“We don't want to compete with the universities, “ says Fritz Hahne, director of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. “We want the universities to feel that this is their place, and that they can come here. We need them, and they need us.”

As for Ms. Zeleke and two of her Ethiopian classmates, they are already planning their return home from Cape Town. “We need to have an AIMS in Ethiopia,” she says.