GLOBAL: Engineer shortage threatens development

An acute and growing shortage of engineers worldwide has become a threat to global development, a new Unesco report has revealed. It is based on contributions by 120 experts and is the first global report on engineering.

Engineering: Issues, challenges and opportunities for development identified more than 50 fields of engineering and focused on its contributions to sustainable human, social and economic development.

In the past 150 years engineering and technology had transformed the world, wrote Unesco Director-General Irina Bokova in the foreword. But the benefits were unevenly distributed and as the 2015 deadline for achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals approached, "it is vital that we take the full measure of engineering's capacity to make a difference in the developing world."

The report found escalating demand for engineers in all fields.

In Sub-Saharan Africa alone 2.5 million new engineers and technicians were needed if the region was to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal of improved access to clean water and sanitation. There was a ray of hope: in South Africa, the continent's leader for engineering enrolments in absolute terms, there was a 60% increase between 2000 and 2006.

The report said the shortage of engineers was marked in many countries.

"Germany reports a serious shortage of engineers in most sectors, and in Denmark a study showed that by 2020 the labour market will be lacking 14,000 engineers," said a statement accompanying the report.

"And although in absolute numbers the population of engineering students is multiplying worldwide, percentages are dropping compared to enrolment in other disciplines. In Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the Republic of Korea, for example, enrolment decreases of 5% to 10% have been recorded since the late 1990s."

The report's editor and head of engineering sciences at Unesco, Dr Tony Marjoram, said: "The decline in engineering's popularity among students is apparently due to a perception that the subject is boring and hard work, jobs are badly paid considering the responsibilities involved, and engineering has a negative environmental impact, and may be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution."

As a way of increasing enrolments the report recommended transforming engineering through, among other things, developing new approaches including hands-on, problem-based learning that reflected engineering's problem-solving nature.

Engineering, Marjoram said, also needed "to promote itself as relevant to solving contemporary problems, to become more socially responsible and to link to ethical issues related to development. This will also help attract young people."

The report also revealed concerns over gender parity in engineering enrolment: women's participation in many countries had increased during the 1980s and 1990s to more than 20% in some cases, but since 2000 the numbers had been sliding back.

"In some countries the percentage of women in engineering is below 10%, and in a few countries there are virtually none at all. A recent two-year study in the United Kingdom of why engineering does not attract more women pointed to persistent stereotypes that identified it as a strictly technical, masculine occupation," the report said.

The report found that engineering was often overlooked in development policy and planning, and there was a need for improved public and policy-level understanding of the field and how it contributed to development.

One recommendation was to improve statistics on engineering to help policy-makers and planners. It was currently impossible to compare the numbers or types of engineers per capita around the world, the report found, because such data at the international level aggregate scientists and engineers.