Universities in Africa have been asked to have a common study unit on data science to walk in tandem with the rest of the world in the “data revolution era”.
Pius Odhiambo, a data science consultant based in the US and founder of Blue Nile Analytica (BNA), says Africa was being left behind as organisations and individuals keep generating huge volumes of data.
“‘Time has come and universities need to think outside the box and introduce a common unit called data science,” the Kenyatta University trained secondary school teacher said.Mr Odhiambo, who taught in Kenya for 10 years before moving to Washington DC, said during his days at KU Prof George Eshiwani, who was the vice-chancellor, introduced a common study unit in information technology (IT) that every student and worker had to enrol in.
Everyone should have basic knowledge in data analysis using tools such as Excel and Basic Python “because we are drowning in data,” said the founder of BNA, a data science mentorship programme.
Various domains, including medicine, education, finance, environment, economics, and agriculture generate huge volumes of data that should be mined for useful insights, including putting into jobs the hundreds of thousands of graduates that are looking for the hard-to-find employment.
He is making the proposal a few months after the University of Nairobi scrapped a number of common units, including communication skills, fundamentals of development, human health, law in society, environment science, chemistry and its application, science and technology in development, elements of economics and HIV/Aids.
Universities the world over study the trends and come up with common units irrespective of discipline and domain in the hope of preparing their graduates to survive well in the society. In Kenya, a number of universities are engaging historians, mathematicians, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists to introduce students to behavioural science and liberal arts courses since practice requires experts to understand human behaviour.
Unfortunately, this has been happening against the backdrop of rebellion where students question the relevance of anthropology, for example, in their already demanding subject programmes. Interestingly, the more seasoned practitioners have been eating humble pie when they encounter challenges in the field that border on the benefits of the common units they tossed out the window as undergraduate or postrad students.
A small percentage of graduates has dropped core subjects to specialise in subsidiaries such as ICT, psychology and anthropology. They have gone ahead, buoyed by rare passion and grit, to start movements in such non-core subjects to change lives positively and influence key policy changes.Mr Odhiambo has, however, challenged universities to stop offering data science as a four-year course, saying it is interdisciplinary and a data scientist needed to specialise in a domain to effectively mine the mounds of data around them.
“Offering data science as a Bachelor’s degree on its own is like a waste of time; it should be a dual degree.”In the future, primary and secondary schools in Africa can introduce data science as a teaching subject, he suggested, pointing out that “when we expose our students early, they can be employed as consultants”.
