Nirmal Shah
Seychelles has just concluded its first Science, Technology and Innovation Forum, a 3 day initiative that brought together local and international experts to discuss the country’s future. As expected, digitisation, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies dominated the agenda. Obviously people looked towards advanced economies particularly the United States.
But there is another country whose experience deserves careful attention, where something never envisaged anywhere in the world is happening.
Between 2021 and 2025, China revoked or suspended more than 12,000 undergraduate degree programmes and introduced over 10,000 new ones, reshaping more than 30% of the national undergraduate programme catalogue.
The expansion is concentrated in artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, data science and other strategically important technologies, while many traditional programmes in the humanities, arts and some management disciplines have been scaled back.
This is not simply an education reform. It is industrial policy expressed through universities. China is aligning the skills it produces with the economy it wants to build.
Seychelles faces a different reality but the same strategic question. We have a small and ageing population, growing dependence on expatriate labour, persistent skills mismatches, and ambitious plans for a digital economy, the Blue Economy, biotechnology and climate resilience. Yet our education and training systems still need to become far more demand-led, responding to the skills the economy will require rather than those it has traditionally supplied.
Innovation is not only about investing in technology. It is about investing in people with the right skills, at the right scale, at the right time. If a giant country like China can redesign a third of its university programmes in just five years, how quickly can tiny Seychelles align its education system with the economy it wants to build? The future does not wait for us to prepare, it has already arrived.
