Scholars in the country have expressed concerns over acute shortage of Computer Science lecturers; a gap they said should be filled immediately to equip interested Kenyans with computation, information, and automation knowledge.
With increasing recognition of computer science as a fundamental skill and the numerous opportunities that continue to arise from the broad field, the academics rooted for increased training of trainers to accommodate the high number of students seeking to be skilled.
Considering the critical role Computer Science plays in the contemporary world where almost everything is technologically driven, lack of the subject educators has been cited as a genuine crisis with academics now calling for training of specialists in the field to fill the gap.
Speaking at Zetech University recently, the scholars led by Catherine Muraga, the Managing Director (MD) of Microsoft Africa Development Center (ADC) called on universities to leverage on the opportunities in the field to train more instructors.
“As Kenya continues to position itself better in the tech world and as we continue to engage the world of academia, we need to for example improve performance in mathematics to improve the enrolment of students taking STEM related courses. If we have a shortage from a country perspective, let us take advantage of the East African Community to tap lecturers or maximize on hybrid learning and training,” Muraga said.
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Her sentiments were echoed by the Zetech University Deputy Vice Chancellor, Prof Alice Njuguna who revealed that currently the tutors in the country of teachers with IT specialization are relatively low.
“As we were going about our research and after talking to our industry partners, we discovered that there is a gap and opportunities to scale up the training of IT specialists to higher levels to better understand the industry, do research and come up with products that can be commercialized and taken to the market so that we don’t just continue consuming imported products,” said Njuguna.
Prof Njuguna revealed that the Kenyan market is technologically mature to come up with solutions facing the country but therein lies a gap in the number of highly trained professionals to train students.
“This field is highly lucrative and once one does a degree, they are easily absorbed into the market. Often, such graduates get busy and they forget to advance their training leaving no people to train the students in the bachelors’ level,” stated Njuguna.
By Kamau Njoroge
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