clipped from: news.bbc.co.uk   

Focusing on basic healthcare and primary education is stopping Africa developing, Professor Turok suggests.

The founder of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) says investment in higher education is key.

He says Africa needs its own science and technology skills base to become an equal partner in the global economy.

If Africa doesn't have its own scientific and technological community, there is no way in which it can ever be an equal partner in the economy of the world

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, the institute accepts students from all over Africa.

We saw these students come in, from the Congo and Sudan and Liberia, many countries we tend to think of as disaster areas
But we recruited students from these countries and what we saw was they absolutely thrived in an environment that was focused on high-level science