With the world’s youngest population, Africa has an immense opportunity for inspiring, educating and empowering its next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs. It is crucial to provide safe, inclusive and effective learning environments for all, expanding access to quality education that is also relevant to the needs of the continent. Africa is also severely affected by climate change, standing out as the world’s most vulnerable region.
La Fondation Dassault Systèmes is committed to supporting Africa’s continued development in a sustainable manner. On Africa Day, which serves as an occasion for the world to acknowledge the achievements of the peoples and governments of Africa, we are proud to highlight projects that contribute to better educational opportunities, reduced inequalities, and climate action, in alignment with several of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Read on to learn more about three specific projects underway in Africa.
Ethiopia: Educating future leaders
The world’s poorest country is undergoing a remarkable economic renaissance, holding great promises for its young population representing a great diversity of peoples. Transforming education is critical to make it happen.
(EEI) in their mission to develop and deliver a model for superior educational opportunities for talented Ethiopian students that will ignite transformational changes in their education system. Their first project is a Design Lab and Robotics Center program for 400 students of promise recruited from across the country offered by the Haile-Manas Academy (HMA). The program is the first of its kind and can be replicated everywhere to become the model for providing Ethiopia’s most promising secondary students with a superior education while helping to transform the education available to all Ethiopian students. The result is a new generation of resilient, independent, community-minded and enterprising young citizens who have the tools to create positive change in Ethiopia and in the world.
HMA Design Lab and Robotics center project supports three of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Quality education, Reduced Inequalities and Partnership for the Goals.
(DTA) to launch Innotech Lab, the first high-tech innovation center for technology, industrialization and education in Cameroon.
The mission of InnoTech Lab is to instill an inclusive and sustainable transformation of African society based on industry and digital technology, while creating more access to, understanding of, and experimentation with 3D virtual technologies among young students, teachers, researchers, and their ecosystems.
The InnoTech Lab focuses on training, development, incubation and acceleration of digital know-how and engineering to build problem-solving skills and new jobs, fostering new technologies and applications.
To develop these skills, volunteers with digital expertise regularly meet with DTA and teachers to ensure that the center is advancing and operating with the correct tools and technology. In turn, these trained teachers will now begin to train a new generation of African engineers to meet local industrial workforce needs. To date, the Lab has trained twenty teachers in this innovative learning model.
The Innotech Lab project supports three SDGs: Quality Education, Decent Work and Economic Growth and Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.
Kenya: Using a virtual lake to understand and manage our inland water resources
The short-term future of lakes in arid and semi-arid zones of the world is very uncertain, due to their extreme sensitivity to climate variability and changes in the way we interact with these systems such as modifications in land use or the building of dams.
The dramatic fall in lake level of some great lakes in Africa illustrates the high vulnerability of lakes and their ecosystems. It underlines the critical need to better understand how they work in order to better protect them in the future.
Digital approaches are particularly important for many of the African large lakes as they are often data sparse in terms of measurement and monitoring. La Fondation Dassault Systèmes is partnering with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who is coordinating a team of teachers and researchers from the Institut Terre et Environnement de Strasbourg (ITES), the Delft University of Technology, Deltares and the UniLaSalle GéoLab on the Virtual Lakes project, to develop and share a 3D numerical simulation model of sedimentary hydrodynamics that are specific to lakes.
The project team will simulate conditions such as rapidly varying water levels, shoreline migration, deltas, segmentation hydrodynamics and water quality for Lake Turkana in Kenya.
La Fondation Dassault Systèmes Virtual Lake project supports three of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action, and Partnership for the Goals.
.
Learn about La Fondation Dassault Systèmes here.
Maryann is a Senior Communications Manager on the Dassault Systèmes corporate communications team. She’s been with the company for over 16 years, in roles ranging from marketing communications,internal communications, creative and branding, blogging to marketing programs manager.