Engineering Doctoral Training in Southern Africa

Despite the abundance of natural resources in Southern Africa, these remain largely untapped due to a lack of appropriate skills and technologies, leaving the region with insufficiencies. Relevant skills are necessary to develop appropriate technologies to drive regional industries. This chapter focuses on engineering education and training in Southern Africa in a bid to resolve complex issues such as the shortage of engineering skills through a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat analysis and then mapping available skills and qualifications as a cohort of engineering institutions, to form the foundation for formulating a strategy for doctoral training in engineering. The collaborations enabled the sharing of the limited resources, by designating the partner institutions as centres of excellence, depending on their strengths. Such centres were the ‘launching pads’ for high-level engineering education through which the proposed doctoral training centres operate to provide the much-needed high-end (PhD) skills to resolve regional challenges for global competitiveness and realisation of value from the multitude of resources.