Liberation by Robotics: Street Engineers as Toy Makers in Africa

In the rural town of Opuwo, Namibia, a team of five young people,, have been working since 2017 on their toy car business. We call them street engineers, because, while they are formally unqualified as engineers, they are informally, or streetwise, qualified because they engineer solutions that meet with their customers' demands, with an inventive twist. Recently, the street engineers joined forces with a university research team to extend their range of products to include robotics. The context was interesting for researchers seeking for innovative practice in engineering education, for several reasons. First, it provides a prime example of a local situation where an increasing number of young talents, despite having limited or irrelevant formal engineering education, globally struggle with designing inventive solutions, engineered of components that are available. Secondly, it poses challenges for devising informal approaches for engineering education, complementing contemporary, typically formal approaches. Thirdly, it calls for engineering education that starts from recognizing young people's hunger for improving their livelihoods through fast-tracked learning. Fourthly, the street engineers aim to develop technologies which, by far, extend the existing state-of-the-art in their context, paving the way for the application and even the design of advanced technologies, especially robotics, at the grassroots, a much promoted political slogan in the Global South. The qualitative analysis of the data sourced in the real-life context of the street engineers identified twelve dimensions of limitations that restrict the work, achievements and outcomes of the street engineers. At the same time, the further interpretation of the limitations indicates a range of opportunities by which design or engineering activities, including entry-level robotics, liberates street engineers from the identified limitations. The context shares the characteristics of places where oppressed people globally live, because of the socio-economic profile of Opuwo and the surrounding Kunene region. Paulo Freire suggests that instead of what he calls the banking model of education, where knowledge is deposited in learners' minds and which, hence, does not transform their living conditions, the oppressed only can be liberated by problem-posing education which aims at identifying challenges and then designing disruptive solutions to them, by those that are limited or bound by their poverty. While obtained within a given context, the results of the investigation can be re-contextualized and used for reforming engineering education in the Global South, to be relevant in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In an increasingly diverse, global world, robotics invites the much too often marginalized young people to open their minds for and by engineering novel solutions.