“The only thing to change your beliefs or values is education, and when you learn, your beliefs and value system advance” - A passionate advocate of education drives change in the African continent

As a child in a small village called Yedeman Kuskam in rural Ethiopia, Baylie Damtie had an insatiable curiosity: “What happens if I go all the way to the horizon? Will I fall off?” This thirst for knowledge set him on a researcher's path and turned him into a passionate advocate for higher education as a power of change in society.

To hear him tell it, Baylie Damtie makes it sound like he was always lucky to be in the right place at the right time. His brother grew up with no school, but when Baylie himself was a child, a new school, Yeted Elementary School, was built in his village and he got access to education.

“School was a way to explore the world, which I understood early on. After the 8th grade I moved to the nearest town to continue studying. I didn't know what I was going to study, but it was obvious that I should join the university and get a degree,” Damtie says.

Damtie had an inclination to become a natural scientist and he got a degree in physics. He also got a job as a science demonstrator in Addis Ababa, followed by graduate assistant in physics at Bahir Dar University, but this was interrupted in another case of being in the right place at the right time. He received a scholarship to go to the other side of the world, to the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. There, he had to choose between quantum physics or space physics, and he chose the latter. He particularly immersed himself in the remarkable history of the aurora, including the discovery of the physics of the aurora by Kristian Birkeland.

“They had a high-end radar system for space research in Norway as well as Sweden and in Sodankylä, Finland. I realised that you can do something really serious in Norway. They had a space program where they would invite the leading experts in the world in a given topic to teach us,” Damtie recollects.

Among the visiting professors were Markku Lehtinen and the late Tuomo Nygrén from the University of Oulu, who came to teach about measuring the key characteristics of the ionosphere by means of an incoherent scatter radar system. Damtie got very interested in the statistical and mathematical nature of the subject and was excited to find that there was a possibility of going to Oulu for doctoral studies. He applied to the University of Oulu and was accepted into a PhD programme.

Damtie described his years in the North as transformative. He had learned in school in Ethiopia how the sun doesn't set above the Arctic Circle in the summer, but hearing about it was one thing and experiencing it was something completely different. In Oulu he enjoyed riding everywhere on his bike, which inspired him later to initiate and support a master plan of Bahir Dar by the Bahir Dar University that included bicycle routes. He says his PhD supervisors also took him in culturally, and he was welcomed by Lehtinen to his cottage numerous times and experienced the Finnish culture and nature in Lapland. To this day he feels very nostalgic about his time in Oulu.

Life in the Nordic countries in general was very different from Ethiopia, and he wanted to understand why.

“I realized that leaders can make a profound change in society and are the engine of transformation. When I was studying physics, I didn’t pay attention to leadership, social sciences, and politics. Why would you study these things when you can just read about them in the newspaper?” Damtie chuckles.

“But I have realized that politics and leadership together drive and direct society’s transformation at scale. In the end, it's all about improving the health, education, and wealth of the people.”

After getting his doctoral degree in Oulu, Damtie's trajectory took him to back to Ethiopia to continue with science but also to develop a space science programme in the country–again, in a stroke of luck as he received a grant to do this from the Finnish government.

Damtie joined the Bahir Dar University, and the same year he became the head of the Physics Department. Soon, his leadership skills made an impression and he advanced quickly to dean, then vice president, and finally to the president of the university, a position he held for seven years.

“Again, I was in the right place at the right time, as Ethiopia allocated significant resources to higher education and we got huge funding to expand programmes and access to education,” Damtie says.

During his time the Bahir Dar University grew from two separate campuses to a complex of eight campuses, with a population of 53,000 students. It was no surprise that Damtie was appointed as the founding Vice Chancellor to lead an ambitious new initiative, establishing a private, nonprofit university in Rwanda with a bold vision to reimagine higher education in Africa. Damtie was given the opportunity to establish the college from scratch.

“Our vision is to provide job-driven and competency-based higher education that is affordable and scalable for learners across Africa. Can we create a new education experience for students where they are the major driver in learning? We demonstrated we can,” Damtie says.

In Kepler College, learning is measured by doing, not through exams and rote memorization. Students are given a relevant project, case studies, or problems and asked to solve them by applying the knowledge and skills they have learned. These projects, case studies, and issues come from the industry and are real-world problems.

In Kepler College, learning is measured by doing, not through exams and rote memorization. Students are given a relevant project, case studies, or problems and asked to solve them by applying the knowledge and skills they have learned. These projects, case studies, and issues come from the industry and are real-world problems.

Job-driven higher education at Kepler College, in close collaboration with industry partners, has resulted in a 90% employment rate within 6 months of graduation, with an average of 150 graduates per year. Damtie is enthusiastic about the College’s strategies to sustain this high graduate employment rate to ensure strong career outcomes for thousands of students each year.

As Damtie himself understood the value of education at a young age, he is determined to instill it in others. To young people he stresses that education is not a degree, but a tool for life.

“Certain things you believe today might hold you back. The only thing to change your beliefs or values is education, and when you learn, your beliefs and value system advance. In physics there is this concept of potential energy. A large collection of water in the highlands is a big potential for electricity, but you need to unleash it. People have the same potential, but they need agency to unleash it,” Damtie says.

And while it certainly helps to be lucky to be in the right place at the right time, unleashing one's potential is the true way to make a change in the world.

“Just imagine how life would be for everyone today if we lived in a world with a system that unlocked the full potential of every human being,” Damtie says.

Text: Janne-Pekka Manninen. Photo: Baylie Damtie's photo album.