This archive report was first published on 20 July 2020.
Kenya's COVID-19 response has highlighted the ingenuity of young people, particularly university students, who have been developing innovative solutions to everyday challenges. However, this is not a new phenomenon, as students have always had brilliant ideas, but lacked the necessary support and visibility.
Before the pandemic, university students' innovations were not making headlines, not because they didn't exist, but because they were not being given the necessary support and visibility. The country had other priorities, and there were few formal support systems for university students with tangible innovations to commercialize them.
What exists is a one-off well-wisher support mechanism, where students wait for a generous corporate or non-governmental organization to sponsor an innovation competition in campus. Unfortunately, some sponsors have been known to steal the intellectual property of these young minds or pay a non-commensurate amount for the ideas.
Dr. Kevin Wachira, a lecturer at South Eastern Kenya University, notes that some local universities have good innovation support infrastructure, including annual exhibitions. However, what is needed is a formal, consistent mechanism at each university or tertiary institution level to identify, finance, and promote campus innovations.
University entrepreneurship and innovation clubs need to be strengthened, with significant and stable financing from the university budget. The universities, in turn, require adequate funding from the National Research Fund (NRF), which should be funded to at least two percent of the country's gross domestic product annually, as envisaged in the Science Technology and Innovation Act 2013.
Local universities and their alumni associations can also emulate globally leading universities' endowment funds, providing a system where successful former students can assist current students achieve their innovation goals.
Our universities remain the single most important sources of knowledge and skills for our country's economic growth and industrialization. Through them, we can have a consistent stream of innovative startup unicorns that would create the much-needed jobs.
