Ethiopian longhorns and our curriculum

Recently, in a meeting with colleagues from the Ministry of Education in Ethiopia, a former education minister told me a remarkable story. “We wanted to increase our capacity in agricultural engineering and animal husbandry” he told me. “So we looked for the best programmes around the world to see what we can do to improve our own capacity in this area. The programmes in the US are always attractive to us Africans,” he said with a sheepish grin, acknowledging the post-colonial dynamics of the world. “We decide to use a similar curriculum as they did and our students loved it. It was more detailed and more exciting than what we had been teaching. The books were beautiful”, he acknowledged.  Only after a few years did they realise that the focus of the programme, that they were following and were remarkably proud of, was on crops and animals found in Texas but not in Ethiopia. In particular, the emphasis of the programme had been on raising and using the iconic Texas cattle, the longhorns, that is not only absent from Ethiopia, but it is found nowhere in the entire African continent. After much debate and the realisation that their agricultural engineering and animal husbandry programme had little value to the society, the Ethiopians decided to change their curriculum for more appropriate context.



The story is both hilarious and sad. The fact that curricula of key disciplines in developing countries are not catering to national needs is a pervasive problem. The problem, unfortunately, is well and thriving in Pakistan, particularly in the discipline of biomedical engineering. Recently, I had the joy of meeting a few faculty members and plenty of students enrolled in biomedical engineering in Pakistan. They, like their peers in the US or elsewhere, were dynamic and interested in big challenges. Yet, the courses or the challenges they talked about had little, if anything, to do with the big healthcare challenges in Pakistan. Now, I am all for thinking big and coming up with bold and transformative ideas. I also believe that we have to learn from the best institutions around the world in shaping and delivering our curriculum, but I have a problem if our own biomedical engineers have no knowledge or capacity to tackle the long-standing problems of our society. Among the students that I met, none had ever been to a local hospital’s biomedical department, had never talked to health professionals about the challenges they face or was ever told about the urgent needs of the society in tackling, curing or managing high impact disease. None of them knew that Pakistan has the third highest child mortality rate in the world and one of the highest burdens of maternal mortality and that we desperately need novel solutions to change the status quo. The only topics relevant to Pakistan, as one student remarked, are taught in Pakistan Studies!

I do not believe that all is lost, just yet. There are some entrepreneurial students, who, based on their own initiatives, are developing mobile phone apps for biomedical applications. But this is too little and often not scalable. First, not all problems can, or should, be solved using mobile phone apps. We have to think outside the (mobile) box here to come up with solutions for our problems, not get a solution first (in this case an app) and then find the appropriate problem to apply our solution to. Second, these students are not getting any help from their curriculum or existing educational infrastructure to see the challenges first hand. Little is being done to change the curriculum to develop capacity in meeting the national public health needs.

Finally, I also want to dispel a common myth, that somehow our biomedical or engineering challenges are simple or intellectually less rigorous. Great solutions to our problems not only have tremendous social impact, they also make great economic sense. With most of the world living in developing countries, the market size for innovations is large and ever increasing. Addressing the complexity of our challenges will lead to development of new technologies and uncovering of new multi-disciplinary knowledge. The opportunity to make deep dents in the number of children, men and women dying due to preventable causes is here, but we have to recognise that the status quo is no longer acceptable — we can choose the path of impact or study about the proverbial longhorns. Let’s hope it’s the former.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th, 2013.

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