OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON SET EDUCATION

Within any town or city, municipalities are expected to serve as a catalyst for positive socio-economic development. Their mandate is to maintain and enable ongoing infrastructure development to support private sector investment, which in turn generates the rates and taxes needed to run municipal programmes. Sounds straightforward, and it should be, assuming the requisite finances and technical skills are in place.

However, for municipal officials – and especially for municipal engineers spearheading service delivery implementation – it’s often a mammoth task. Aside from the issues of maladministration being tackled by the Auditor-General’s office, one of the overwhelming issues is the bureaucratic burden imposed by wellintended legislation like the Preferential Procurement Regulations.

The situation is compounded when there’s a lack of professional capacity to execute acceptable outcomes. This in turn puts tremendous strain on a shrinking pool of skilled personnel within municipalities, with the risk that they end up leaving the public sector.

The knock-on effect is that municipalities will increasingly struggle to attract graduate engineers and young professionals unless the operational environment is modern and forward-thinking. The upside is that some municipalities are well advanced along this path, but we need everyone to be on board.

Grassroots focus

As IMESA, we are committed to supporting our members – both candidate engineers and registered professionals – in terms of training and knowledge transfer.

At a higher level, IMESA is also a participant at the National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF), which represents more than 100 stakeholder entities spanning the private and public sector. But we also appreciate the urgent need to engage with schools at grassroots level to ensure that there’s an understanding and appreciation of the importance of studying in the fields of science, engineering and technology (SET) in a rapidly advancing high-tech world. It’s imperative that we have a pipeline of new talent coming through that will be responsible for designing, building and maintaining our smart cities of the future.

PIRLS findings

The key concern though is whether our schools are adequately equipped to prepare our future engineers if our literacy levels keep declining. This viewpoint is based on the findings of the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which – despite being a statistical snapshot – shows a concerning trend, because numeracy and literacy are interlinked and vital for SET success.

Compared to 2016, South Africa’s mean achievement score dropped from 320 to 288 – the international average being 500 – with Singapore in the lead with a 587 rating. Breaking it down further, 81% of South Africa’s grade 4s and 56% of its grade 6 learners did not reach the low international benchmark category threshold of 400 points upon assessment. The latter is defined as ‘can read to locate and retrieve explicit information’. In comparison, the high international benchmark (550-624) category requires learners to ‘make intricate connections between events in the text; identify crucial features and make generalisations; and interpret complex text and tables.’

While the South African government is trying its best to turn this around, there’s a great deal of work to be done at preand primary school level if we’re going to fulfil the objectives of 5IR (people and machine inclusivity) in harnessing 4IR advances like digitalisation. The intention has never been for artificial intelligence to take over.

In the meantime, it’s crucial that we pool the skills and experience we have in South Africa to ensure the implementation of world-class infrastructure, as well as allied projects like renewable energy that will keep us globally competitive. Public and private sector collaboration is key.