The future of clean energy is nuclear and cooperation with Russia can help eliminate power shortages on the African continent, Prof. Amon Murwira, Zimbabwe's Minister of Education, Science, and Technology Development, told Sputnik Africa on the sidelines of Atomexpo-2024 in Sirius, Russia.
"We, of course, experience a lot of power shortages as we grow our economies," He said. "So it's a very important area that we are cooperating with the Russian Federation to make sure that we have trained enough specialists in order for us to be able to deploy small modular reactors as well as deploy nuclear power plants."
The minister also noted that Zimbabwe's cooperation with Russia will "reinforce" the direction of strengthening the country's sovereignty, including "energy sovereignty within our economy."
"In actual fact, as one of the areas of nuclear power and technology, and energy is the area of industry. Zimbabwe is currently building steel plants; it's currently building a lot of capacity to industrialize," Prof. Murwira said. "We believe that Zimbabwe is poised to become a major contributor to Africa's prosperity, to Africa's industrialization and modernization agenda."
Apart from that, the Zimbabwean official also said that convergence and cooperation with Russia can help a lot in advancing Zimbabwe's healthcare system.
"We are already training a number of students in the Russian Federation, including in the areas of medicine. We have got more than 1300 students who are currently studying in the Russian Federation," he noted. "We have seen displays by Rosatom here on oncological machines and on dialysis machines, and we believe that this kind of technological advancement and our wishes to bring our people to a healthy state coincide very well with the expertise and technological advancements that are happening within the Russian Federation."
He stressed that Russian-African cooperation in the field of medicine "will bring health for all and make sure that health is more affordable and more advanced techniques are being adopted to make sure that we foster a healthier world."