After 5 Years of IERI and 10 Years of our book "Putting Africa First": Where does Africa Stand? (Transcript of speech delivered at the Fifth Anniversary of IERI)

My PhD supervisor Professor Freeman, in the Foreword to our book: Putting Africa First said: “Especially at this time of global economic instability, this work is needed more than ever to protect science and education from inept and misdirected programmes of ’structural adjustment’ and to put the last first. Then the stone that the builders rejected may indeed become the cornerstone of the arch.” In the same book another imminent scholar, Bengt Åake Lundvall, also said, “Can the introduction of the innovation system… open up a new vision, “where the last becomes first’ (p.1)