Research Universities in Africa

International Journal of African Higher Education, 2016

What efforts and policy commitments need to be made, to ensure that higher education in Africa is central to realizing Africa's development imperatives? Both in Africa and among the development partner community, academics and policy makers recognize the importance of higher education for Africa's development. Public and private higher education institutions are expanding, boosting enrollments. In most countries, new buffer bodies have been created to provide governance oversight, guarantee greater institutional autonomy from undue political control, and strengthen the institutions, to allow them engage in national and continental development issues. Greater policy commitments from the African Union Commission (AUC) have rejuvenated regional higher education bodies working to set quality assurance frameworks, and reorganized commissions for science and technology that are mobilizing funding for research and innovation for higher education institutions. Are these developments leveraging higher education institutions to play new important roles in crafting Africa's future? What will it take for Africa's higher education to be pivotal in reconstructing Africa's future? Quels sont les efforts et les engagements politiques qui doivent être mis en oeuvre pour s'assurer que l'enseignement supérieur joue un rôle central dans la réalisation des impératifs de développement en Afrique about the authors: ibrahim oanda, is senior program officer and head of the Training, Grants and Fellowship program at CODESRIA.

2018

Over the past two decades African higher education has undergone profound changes. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities on the continent were few in number, small in scale, and elitist institutions with the limited mandate of producing cadres for the Africanization or indigenization of the newly independent state apparatuses. In the 1980s and 1990s, during the heyday of structural adjustment programs, they were regarded as costly irrelevances at best, or bastions of political unrest at worst. Now, they are seen as essential for the creation of knowledge economies and societies, indispensable for human capital development, and turning Africa’s unprecedented youth bulge into a demographic dividend rather than a Malthusian nightmare.

2017

Chapter 6 is an edited version of 'Chapter 1: The Roles of Universities in the African Context', originally published in Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education (see Cloete & Maassen 2015). The chapter traces how African universities have been grappling with the Castellian functions by situating them in the historical context in which African universities were established and steered.

In October 2001 a conference at Yale on “International Higher Education and African Development” brought together an interdisciplinary group of international experts on higher education in Africa, development in Africa, and for comparative purposes, higher education in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. Although many of the participants regularly attend conferences on Higher Education in Africa, the participation of experts from other sectors and with other approaches brought new insights and new directions to the discussions. The goal of the conference was to explore research and policy issues for higher education and international development with special focus on Africa. More specifically, we aimed to generate new perspectives and approaches for both applied research and policymaking in this field. The two keynote addresses, of broad scope and vision, were delivered to the invited experts plus a larger public audience. The five “anchor papers”, of more targeted scope and detailed analysis, received commentary from two experts from different regional or disciplinary perspectives. They provided the basis for discussion among the conferees.

International Journal of Higher Education, 2012

This article discusses the current dynamics at African universities concerning the quality of teaching, the role of research, the level of community outreach, and the position of higher education in the educational sector as a whole. Points of reference are experiences at the University of the North in South Africa as well as experiences at universities in other African countries such as Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ghana. One of our central conclusions is that the system of education in Africa in general, and higher education in particular, is highly dysfunctional, especially in terms of wasted human capacity as well as financial resources. African higher education institutions cannot close their eyes to the immense skills shortage and the frightening percentages of (youth-) unemployment. This leads to the recommendation that the responsibilities of a university concerning the generation of relevant new knowledge, preparing students adequately as active citizens for the challenges in the labour market, contributing to the development of communities, and fostering critical thinking need to be given high priority.

Journal of Higher Education in Africa

Over the last two decades, funding pressures have forced reforms in the legal framework of public universities in Africa. ‘Acts of Parliament’ and strong government direct control that dominated governance regimes of higher education institutions have given way to broad-based councils with wide representation in university governance organs. The strong emergence of private higher education institutions in the continent has led to the development of alternative forms of institutional management different from those that previously dominated in public institutions. But most of these reforms have resulted in new governance concerns revolving around financing and management, quality of teaching and research, and institutional autonomy. Prompted by the implications of these new concerns, guided by a strong belief that governance frameworks should respect institutional autonomy and institutional management, and that tenets of shared governance are critical to building quality higher educa...

2016

Knowledge, science, technology and innovations have emerged as predominant factors of production in the 21 st century. As such, global economies have joined the race to produce knowledge through investments, regulatory frameworks and macro-economic policies that favour research and innovation. Higher education stands out as a key antecedent of knowledge. Within Africa, from issues of limitations and restrictions to access, higher education service provision has been diversified; the number of Universities increased and enrolments have soared amidst funding and quality challenges. This study of six countries shows how African higher education system are striving to cope with the new context of knowledge production, over and above the traditional role of producing skilled labour. National governments have come up with initiatives and policy documentation that will ensure that Africa can fit within the knowledge economy dispensation. The study affirms that beyond the policy documents,...