Africa loses billions to brain drain each year as skilled professionals seek opportunities abroad. Innovative programs in Ghana aim to keep talent in sustainability-related sectors by providing world-class education and salaries worth staying for.
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00:00Every little detail is important. William Asamoah is putting his invention to the test.
00:08The engineering student wants to help Ghana's farmers by cutting the cost of using solar power.
00:15What I'm doing is building an inverter for pumps, for AC pumps, for solar power irrigation.
00:22Contrary to the DC power irrigations that are expensive.
00:26This will make it easy for farmers to buy and maintain.
00:30The power of the sun might be free, but farmers currently have to dig deep in their pockets.
00:36If they want to run water pumps from that energy to adjust the electricity currents,
00:42they require transformers, for example, which can cost some 1,500 U.S. dollars in Ghana.
00:50Asamoah's invention does away with the need for transformers.
00:54This system, they buy our inverter and they buy an AC pump and solar panels and they are good to go.
01:00This makes it cheaper than the existing solar power irrigation system.
01:07Ghana needs engineers like William Asamoah.
01:11But according to estimates, some 70,000 skilled professionals leave Africa each year in search of a better future elsewhere.
01:21The ARCIS, the Regional Center for Energy and Environmental Sustainability in Western Ghana, is trying to help stop that brain drain.
01:30Today, master's students are learning how to manage peak power consumption and avoid electricity outages.
01:38The ARCIS is one of the World Bank's higher education centers of excellence in Africa aimed at delivering high-quality training and applied research.
01:48The idea of establishing these centers of excellence is to have these students trained within the country.
01:56And before you can do that, you have to make sure that the quality that they get at home will be compared to the quality that they get when they go outside.
02:03So far, 90 PhD and some 200 master's students have graduated, making it a top choice for students like Georgianan to pursue higher education locally.
02:15Students here are very practical and they are actually making a lot of things.
02:20So some students here make inverters for solar PV, others do softwares for energy management systems.
02:27And people, some students also do something relating to forecasting.
02:31And it's the same thing they are doing, my friend is also doing in the UK.
02:36Because they talk of really about practical, practical aspects of it.
02:41And it's nothing different here.
02:44In the past, things were different.
02:46Before his entry, the director of the center felt he had to leave Ghana and go abroad in order to get good education.
02:53I was trained at a cost of about 110,000 euros in Holland for my PhD.
02:59But then you can use 25,000 to 30,000 dollars to train a PhD student in Ghana.
03:06So that money that was used to train me alone can train four people in Ghana.
03:12So this is how the whole concept is.
03:15So when now you train the people within Ghana or within Africa, you retain them, the numbers increase.
03:25Today, students from the institute are being put to the test.
03:29They are going to inspect the regional electricity generating company's power distribution system and consider how it could be improved.
03:38And the upcoming engineers already have an idea how Ghana could reduce power losses, save costs and improve the grid stability.
03:46One thing that they could do is to take the grid onto a DC, high voltage DC transmission, which has been trialed around the world.
03:56The current grid architecture, which is using AC system, is not efficient enough.
04:00So we recommend that they transit to the high voltage DC, which is very efficient.
04:06That is just an idea for now.
04:08But Ghana's first polluting solar farm went into operation in June 2024.
04:12Based in part on research results from the Center, the West African country aims to produce some 10 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030.
04:23The solar plant on the Gwii Reservoir will play a role in that.
04:27Experts say if highly trained students like these are to be retained in Africa, then salary levels will also have to rise.
04:35The whole issue that fuels brain drain is about remuneration.
04:43So if you have the jobs paying us, we should be paid.
04:50So if government invests in the creation of jobs, it should also come with good pay, so that people see the need to stay back.
05:00Even if I'm saying I'm going outside and I'm going there to work, who stays back to develop our country here?
05:07In the end, we have to come back and contribute to the development of our country.
05:13William Asamoah believes that in the future his invention will help improve the lives of Ghana's farmers, as well as generate enough income for himself.
05:23The institute is now helping him to launch his invention on the market.