Stem the ‘driver’, now let us give it the passengers

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) are, indisputably, drivers of development. Since the Stone Age, man has been preoccupied with inventions and innovations; to this there will be no end.

Through Stem, we have developed crafts that pierce into and remain afloat in the skies, submarines that venture into the earth’s belly and agricultural technologies with the ability to induce flora and fauna to produce in plenty.

Everette Rogers, the father of diffusion of innovations theory, puts a very small number to innovators in his graphical representation of how new things permeate a social system. His graph blows out as it approaches the centre, occupied by early and late majority, and tapers off to the left into laggards. The Kenyan laggards may include sects that let their innocent babies die of malaria and other vaccine-preventable diseases.

Gender disadvantage

 Rogers’s theory does not see numerical or gender disadvantage with innovators but with the whole cascade of processes that follow emergence of an innovation. Emphasis should be on utility of innovation and users who determine its adoption and subsequent multiplier effect.

The individuals in Stem are drivers; they are out specifically to find solutions to humanity’s problems. But Stem minds place too much value on their inventions, blurring their vision of important players: Policymakers and the masses.

Poor communication among scientists has not helped to bring on board policymakers, who hold the cake-sharing knife during allocation of national resources. The public is oblivious to Stem’s potency as the role models are hidden in laboratories, enrobed in demigod gowns.

Stem outputs from developing countries are selling big in overseas markets while their countries of origin battle with the very problems already assigned a solution.