Future Narratives

Conni’s guest today is Binyam Sisay Mendisu. He completed his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oslo in 2008. Between 2008 and 2016, he taught full-time at Addis Ababa University (AAU) as an Assistant and later Associate professor. Currently, he is serving as an Associate Professor of African Languages and Linguistics at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Binyam’s research considers language as an archive of local knowledge and memory.

His (co)-authored publications include Multilingual Ethiopia: Linguistic Challenges and Capacity Building Efforts (2016) and Restoring African Studies to Its Linguistic Identity:
Reflection on Ethiopian Studies (2014).
Recently, he worked as an education specialist at UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA) leading programs and projects on teacher policy development, mother tongue and early childhood education. He is a member of the Global Young Academy, and an inaugural fellow and Steering Committee member of the African Science Leadership Program (ASLP). He also serves as Vice President for Capacity Development in the Governing Board of International Network of Government Science Advice (INGSA).

In this episode, Connie speaks with Dexter Tagwireyi. He is an academic pharmacist-toxicologist and Associate Professor of Pharmacy at the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Zimbabwe. He has been teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels for almost 20 years now and has supervised numerous student research projects at both these levels including 5 completed PhDs.

Today's guest is Sibusiso Biyela. He is a science communicator at ScienceLink, a science communication company in South Africa, and he is also a science writer for SciBraai, a South African science news website. He pursued his Bsc Chemistry in Physics at the University of Zululand and he is currently completing his degree at the University of Pretoria.

Sibusiso has worked as a news reporter, a television producer, and he has been a professional science communicator since 2016. He has been a public speaker at international conferences in the United States and various engagements in South Africa where he speaks about decolonizing science through science communication. His latest project has been helping to train a natural-language-processing algorithm to translate scientific terms into six African languages, all based on research conducted in Africa.

Our Guest today is Ayobami Ojebode. He is a professor of Applied Communication in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His research interests are community communication; community governance; new media; and political communication. His works have been published in reputable outlets in many countries.

Professor Ojebode has been a visiting researcher, a visiting scholar, a keynote speaker, a consultant, a trainer and/or examiner in universities and research institutes in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Peru and the United States. He delivered the keynote paper at the 2012 National Programmes Planning Conference of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) in Akure, Ondo State, titled Radio programming in the twenty-first century: face-to-face with reality.

This podcast was born somewhere in 2016, in the small village of Nkozi in Central Uganda, not far from one of the spots where the equator line crosses the country. I had recently completed my PhD in Education and was involved in various projects in which we were trying to understand how we could improve the outcomes of our education system – especially those in the early years. For decades, now, the national assessments on the outcomes in the early years of schooling in Uganda had repeatedly shown that after 3 years in primary school, up to 7 out of every 10 children were unable to read at Primary 2 level and that by the 7th year of primary school 3 out of 10 still couldn’t read at Primary 2 level. The findings for numeracy were not much better, and it seemed that many other African countries were facing similar problems. The other reason it made sense for me to focus on the early childhood years is also that when these early basic skills are not properly developed, it becomes harder for children to acquire the higher-order skills that are the focus at higher levels of education.

A new podcast about education in Africa for our collective #futureframedTV podcast hosted by the amazing Dr. Connie Nshemereirwe.

Dr. Connie Nshemereirwe is an independent science and policy facilitator and acts at the science-policy interface as a trainer, writer, and speaker. She is the director of the Africa Science Leadership Programme (ASLP) based at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and also works with the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR) based in Nairobi, Kenya. Through organizations like these, she works with both academics and policymakers to contribute to evidence-based policy.

Her undergraduate studies were in Civil Engineering, but in later years she made the shift to Education by completing a master’s degree in the design of education and training systems at the University of Twente in 2004, later followed by a PhD in Educational Measurement at the same University in 2014.

She is also active in Civil Society through the Ugandan Think Tank, Kigo Thinkers, and speaks at and attends various public engagement activities on the subject of adequacy and relevance of formal education in Uganda.

Away from work, Dr. Nshemereirwe enjoys reading fiction as well as works on a wide range of subjects, from philosophy to personal development. She is also an active Toastmaster: a member of two clubs and founder of a university-based Toastmaster club.