The Role of Space in Education in Africa

Abstract

Education is the key for the development of a nation or group of nations. Unfortunately, at a world scale, in particular, Sub-Saharan African countries are still lagging behind in terms of education, mainly due to not only financial but also sociocultural reasons. The Millennium Development Goals initiated by the United Nations had as one of its main goals to ensure that all children would be able to benefit from education by 2015. Although major progress was made, this goal was not achieved in Africa and is now replaced by another target for 2030. Recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has unfortunately also delayed progress due to closed schools and lack of informatics infrastructure in some countries, in particular in Africa. A secondary issue is the lack of solid Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and interest. Here, space can play a paramount role, not as a purpose to create more space engineers and scientists, but also to foster the interest in STEM via space examples and, as such, encourage to start tertiary-cycle studies in engineering or science. Several initiatives will be discussed in this article on how space education could be able to support the technological development in Sub-Saharan Africa.