Modern Indigenous Raw Materials Processing Machineries Realization: Imperatives Of Inter- And Multi-Disciplinary, Engineering Project Teams’ Approach

摘要

It is a generally acknowledged fact that African nations are largely dependent on industrialized, and mostly, developed nations for machineries needed by industries for the production of consumer goods from primary and secondary raw materials. This contributes in no small measures, to the pressure on the external reserves of these nations that are in the main, poor, and barely developing. This is despite the fact that African nations are blessed with an abundance of primary raw materials, and without doubt, most, like Nigeria, with engineering manpower of different specialities that have not be galvanized to tackle the obvious challenge of lack of modern, indigenous, raw materials processing machineries; designed, developed, implemented, tested and manufactured in Africa, and for use in Africa and elsewhere outside Africa. This paper therefore, seeks to highlight to industry and academic based engineering professionals that no doubt, has the onerous burden of tackling this challenge for Africa, the need for, concerted, inter- and/or multi-disciplinary, raw materials processing machineries project teams’, targeted at machineries for processing various raw materials to consumer goods, and other secondary raw materials. The nature of the team-based approach to problem solving, and hence, needs’ realization, is explained; and, a group/team based problem solving framework is also presented in this paper.