Molutsi hails new research ministry
Baboki Kayawe | Wednesday October 5, 2016 16:31
In an interview, Molutsi told Mmegi that policies, work and practice in general, should be research based as that approach provides a formula to measure progress and failure.
“Investing in that particular process is critical as we are living in a world where everything is a product of research,” Molutsi said.
In the tertiary education sphere for instance, he said institutions are doing poorly in terms of tracer studies and market surveys. As a result, it is difficult to measure employability, marketability as well as relevance of programmes offered by the country’s higher learning institutions. Moreover, he described the prevalent attitude in Africa where inventions and products are shipped from China, Japan and elsewhere as worrisome. He said little time, labour and resources were being channelled towards research development locally.
Molutsi added that as the country celebrates its golden jubilee, it would have been prudent for thorough research to be undertaken to look at the evolution of major institutions.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation(UNESCO) recommends that countries spend three percentage of their GDP on research and development, but Botswana’s current investment is below a percentage point (0.34 percent). Now country manager of an educational research consultancy, Joint Minds Consult, Molutsi conceded that he did not do enough to advocate for research while at HRDC “because it was not a research institution”. He said he had pushed for elements of research to be included within HRDC.
“I did my best to imprint the research activity into the mandate of HRDC,” he said.
Meanwhile, Joint Minds Consult will from October 7 to next week, bring leading international scholars and research leaders to conduct three research seminars on Research Data Management. The seminars will be for the Botswana Institute for Technology Research and Innovation, University of Botswana and Botswana International University of Science and Technology.
Ross Wilkinson of Australian National Data Service, Mark Parsons, Secretary General of Research Data Alliance, John Wood who is co-chairperson of the Research Data Alliance and Secretary General of Association of Commonwealth Universities as well as Simon Hodson, Executive Director of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, will speak at the seminars.