African Institute for Mathematical Sciences - (AIMS)

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is an educational centre in Cape Town, South Africa. The goals of AIMS are:

• To promote mathematics and science in Africa.
• To recruit and train talented students and teachers.
• To build capacity for African initiatives in education, research, and technology.

The Institute is focussed around a nine-month, postgraduate course covering many of the most exciting areas of modern science, taught by outstanding African and international lecturers. The course develops strong mathematical and computing problem-solving skills and leads to a postgraduate diploma in the Mathematical Sciences, formally accredited by the three partner South African Universities and taught in association with the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of Oxford, and the University of Paris-Sud 11. Students with good mathematics, science or engineering degrees are invited to apply and will be supported on bursaries where needed.

Google hiring in developing markets and education reform

I just read an interesting Fortune article about Google hiring in India, and thought "wow that is a lot of money." Google has gone to the extreme to hire quality human capital for R&D operations in India. Perks for working at Google India include: taxi service, health care for parents, and etc.

Google is hiring in Africa, but mostly in Kenya and South Africa. Google is not doing this because of pure development/need goals. Google sees Africa and other developing markets as an opportunity. As soon as we get some reliable communications infrastructure: WiMax, fiber, other microwave technology Google will be scaling it's workforce in Africa.

One thing I realized reading this article is that, India is attractive because of it's huge graduate pool of students in the universities each year in Science and engineering. India graduates like 50 million students a year! What we need, and what is lacking is more technical education in science and engineering. One person leading the charge in technical education in Africa is Patrick Awuah from Ghana.

Patrick is President of Ashesi University; even though Ashesi is located in Accra, Ghana a good percentage of it's students are from neighboring countries. We have 53 countries, imagine each country having a dozen quality university or technical schools. This could be very attractive to a company like Google to hire and train African programmers or computer scientists.