Africa’s Path to Growth and Sustainable Development: African Universities’ Collaborative Research in Technological Innovations, Utilization of Local Content Materials in the Production of Technological and Other Goods and Consumption of Locally-Made Goods

Abstract

Introduction This paper was not written to bemoan the backwardness and underdevelopment of Africa and hold Europeans responsible for the prevailing situation in the continent (Rodney, 1972; Agbo, 2012). Rather, it was a soul-searching discourse to identify what Africans have done to keep themselves under bondage (Igwe, 2010; Meredith, 2011) and neglected to do(Garba, 1987; Guest, 2004) to extricate themselves from the vice grip of neo-colonialism, underdevelopment and lack of a sustainable development ideology (Okonkwo, Ejiogu & Osakpa, 2017). This paper places Africans in proper perspective to assess the predicament of the continent and its people (Ashimolowo, 2007; Clarke, 2008; Morris, 2011).Since the fall of apartheid, the last vestige of slave trade and colonialism in Africa, the challenge of growth