51吃瓜

Text as delivered*

A Very special thank you to our partners of choice and I would like also to tell my dear sister her excellence deputy chairperson of the African union how proud I am to see you here, thank you very much. I have only one idea, can I? Very quickly. I've been Minister of finance and plan for 10 years, I will use my planing mindset if you allow me. Today education in Africa faces a duality situation. First, we have not address, the past. We have not delivered the end of the journey of education. This is the reason we have one hundred million outside school etc. all the numbers that they have been given. We still do that. My dear brother Gatete call them “basics”. We need for a policy making, be conscious that we have no other alternative than address what has not been done in the past, the basics.

At the same time, the same Ministry of Education or plan or Finance needs to be ready to have the mind set, the tools, the technical skills in terms of STEM to address the challenges of the future. You named it, artificial intelligence, bio technology, you named it. The question is, these two work streams require two different policy mix, completely, and you have to combine those under the same umbrella. They require two different policy mix, but there is a common denominator on both: digital. You need to put digital transformation in the work stream to address the past that we have not done, and we need to put digital transformation to address 21 century.

But how come we are going to deliver digital to serve this work stream without STEM? I can’t. It’s not my speciality, I used to say my speciality is to create public debt not that. But for me, STEM becames, and I have been using that words and I will be finish here. STEM from an African stand point with all my due respect is not longer gourmet. Sorry, it’s no longer gourmet. It needs to be everywhere. The same time you roll out this first work stream you address the basics, you better put STEM there. The exemple that I gave is the other day and I finish here. Do you have a school under a tree? You’d better put Wi-Fi there and you’d better to leave STEM under that school and under that tree right now otherwise we will not be able to create millions jobs that we need to create to have a peaceful continent and I stop here, thank you.

*This text is an AI-generated transcript of the statement, which was obtained from an archived video recording of the event. It is not an official text of the statement.