EDUCATION-AFRICA: Rethinking Strategy To Meet New Challenges

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Judith Achieng'

NAIROBI, Feb 7 2001 (IPS) - Faced with diminishing funding support from the government, mainly due to economic problems and donor pressure for reforms, the African University is being urged to rethink its strategy and invent new ways of supplementing its programmes.

Top scholars and experts from 169 universities in Africa, meeting in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, this week, also have been urged to transform higher education from its current detached role to more vibrant centres of excellence able to provide workable solutions to challenges confronting the continent in the 21st century.

“At a time when the university is being looked upon as the provider of possible solutions to the myriad of problems facing our society today, universities can no longer be ivory towers operating away from public concerns,” head of the Inter- University Council for East Africa, Chacha Nyaigotti, told the more than 300 participants at the meeting.

The challenges facing the African universities include poor funding, declining infrastructure from buildings, libraries to laboratories, “brain drain” of trained university staff to institutions abroad, the need to adopt information technology, and high unemployment rates among university graduates.

The five-day conference, being held under the auspices of the Uganda-based African Association of Universities (AAU) heard that most African universities, unable to pay their bills and sufficiently remunerate their academic staff, already have resorted to, with mixed results, donor-funded programmes and parallel private courses.

“There are so many institutions competing for the meager resources. Higher education is no longer a top priority,” Nyaigotti said.

Addressing the gathering, Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi said the key to solving the myriad of problems facing African universities, lies in the continent’s past collective experiences in its struggle against oppression and domination, which resulted in the formation of modern African states.

“Africa requires an ideology and history that reveals its true character as a fighting, and not a beggar continent,” Moi said. “Africa’s proud history needs to be given new emphasis, so that it can inspire our people to face the current problems of development and do things for themselves.”

Instead, said Moi, Africa is embroiled in conflicts, which have undermined the goals of education in the continent. “It is valueless to educate children, who will in the end become helpless victims of endless and senseless wars,” he said.

Besides funding, African universities also are being challenged to harness opportunities of globalisation and effects of information revolution, against a backdrop of declining telecommunication infrastructure and unreliable electricity supply.

“Developing countries cannot hope to comprehend and apply technology if they don’t have higher institutions that respect the highest possible standards,” Ahmadou Lamine Ndiaye, former rector of the Universite Gaston Berger de Saint Louis, Senegal maintained.

The African Association of Universities holds its conference once every four years. The last meeting took place in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1997.

The delegates also are concerned about the increasing problem of “brain drain” as more and more university professors and administrators are taking up more lucrative appointments abroad and in the non-academic private sectors.

Moi said many problems facing African countries today are a result of weaknesses in curricula inherited from European colonial powers.

Information technology and sheer accumulation of knowledge will not help raise the standards of living of African people, Moi said, unless the knowledge acquired is relevant to the needs of the continent.

“In my view, learning institutions have failed to produce critical thinkers capable of coming up with workable solutions to the problems facing our people,” Moi told the gathering, composed of heads of 169 universities in 43 African countries.

“The critical role of the University in Africa is to develop the human resource base equipped to meet our changing development perspectives. We need to create, not job seekers, but job creators,” said Andrew Siwela, president of AAU.

Although the declarations of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) on global education emphasise on quality and relevance of education, in much of Africa, access to higher education still remains a basic problem, with women particularly disadvantaged.

In a recent research paper, “Women’s participation in education at tertiary level”, Ruth Meena, Tanzanian professor of political science, notes that women on average make only 0.22 per cent of candidates at tertiary education levels.

“Majority of governments have made commitments to redress the imbalance, but few have coherent operational strategies which will hasten the rhetoric into action,” she says.