Nairobi — It's the Nobel Prize season once again. Exactly two years ago, we were celebrating the announcement of Prof. Wangari Maathai as winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

Prof Maathai's Nobel brought the number of African recipients to 13. Except for the 1951 Nobel Prize for Medicine that was awarded to the South African doctor Max Theiler, and the 1999 Nobel Prize for Chemistry awarded to the Egyptian-born Ahmed Zewail, all the others have been either for Literature or Peace.

On this page on October 28, 2004 ("What Africa needs is a Nobel Prize in Science"), we asked why we have won only two Nobels in Science, and none in Economics.

Writing in the Guyana Chronicle on January 16, 2000, Prof Ali Mazrui had raised the same issue, although he was more interested in why our total haul is so miserable.

Mazrui argued that no country had ascended to a first rank technological and economic power by excessive dependence on foreign languages.

Therefore, unless Africa "scientificates" its languages, like the Japanese and Koreans did, instead of remaining dependent on European languages for advanced learning, we are doomed.

THOUGH I AM NOT ENTIRELY Persuaded (there is, for example, the massive exception of India, which is happily taking the lead in more and more technological fields using English) where I think Mazrui's argument is meaty is when he argues that Africa's scientific advancement is greatly hampered by the fact that too many girls are still being excluded from education. And, most of those who go to college, don't study science.

In 2000, only 67 per cent of girls of school age in sub-Saharan Africa were in school.

Of these, only 23 per cent were entering secondary school. And only three per cent found their way into higher education.

Among the young women who finally went to universities, only a small fraction were in science and technology - a mere three per cent in a country like Chad rising to 28 per cent in South Africa, although, Mazrui noted, a disproportionate number in South Africa are non-black.

That said, comparatively fewer young men study science relative to other subjects. In addition, educational policy in most African countries can have a subversive effect.

For example, there's a cap in Kenya on the number of students who can be admitted to study medicine every year.

This has made the medical profession extremely lucrative. So lucrative that while you'll find hundreds of Kenyan professionals working in Kampala, there's probably not a single doctor among them.

It is the same story in a number of other African countries. Because treating the diseases of the masses is so lucrative, not enough doctors go into research.

Therefore, few are in a position to make Nobel Prize-worthy breakthroughs.

THE FACT THAT AFRICAN Governments and businesses spend virtually no money on research and development also reduces the possibilities for remarkable innovations and discovery.

But even with this shameful state of affairs, we should still have been in play for the Nobel if the pool of scientists to pick from weren't so small.

Today, for example, India produces more IT engineers than any developed nation. It produces more engineers than Europe combined.

China is doing even better. It's producing more engineers than most of Western Europe and the US combined.

Purely on the principle of probability, then, India and China will dominate the Nobel Prizes in Science in the decades to come. Africa won't compete, if we don't follow that act.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.