Diversity and Inclusion in Chemical Sciences: The Untold Story for a Black child.
STEM programmes of Southern African universities, particularly larger universities, continue to struggle attracting and retaining talented black African students. Indeed, many black African students tend to gravitate towards careers in finance, medicine, and trade jobs. For those who do pursue a STEM career, engineering and tech focused fields such as computer science tend be more attractive. Thus, despite being the population majority in Southern Africa, black Africans are woefully underrepresented in the chemical sciences field. While many factors contribute towards the low number of black chemical science students, we believe a major cause to be the poor education on the versatility and value of a chemical science degree and the importance of chemical sciences in the modern world. Many STEM degrees, chemical sciences included, focus on giving students flexibility in their curriculum, providing them with a broad range of knowledge and skills in contrast to many fields such as a...