How can we promote talents of African youth? Our education system is geared too much towards academics, and we don't support the development of the arts. It is important that talent identification start early on if we hope to grow faster. While academics is no doubt important, it is even more important that we align each students needs with the areas where they are most gifted in. While a musician such as Alicia Keys starts practicing piano at the age of 4, African talented kids wait till they have finished high school or university before they can start utilising their talents. As African football stars have shown us, there is indeed great money to be made in supporting extra curricular activities. For instance, a player such as Ivory Coasts yaya Toure makes more money than is enough to run his local league, all thanks to his talents in football that see him ply his trade in Manchester City, England.
Then there is a story of a Malawian teenager, William Kamkwamba, who helped develop a wind turbine after lacking school fees to go to high school. Luckily, his story was picked up by the Malawian press, and he was admitted to the African leadership Academy- ALA, from where he went to Dartmouth College. As I
write this, he has cleared his studies at Dartmouth College. There is also another example of a child prodigy, Sierra Leonean teenager, 15 year old Kevin Doe, who wowed MIT experts with his creation of batteries and a generator, even though he had no formal engineering education. The above examples show that there plenty of talent across Africa, but we have to be steadfast to ensure that we identify it at an early age, because right now, we seem to suppress such talents, only when they go outside of Africa do they excel.
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