Africa round table stresses cooperation, governance and academic freedom
“Is African higher education relevant to Africa’s needs?” asked Nahas Angula, Prime Minister of Namibia, special guest at a round table on Africa held during the World Conference on Higher Education. A variety of speakers proposed dynamic and informative responses.
The importance of cooperation and partnership was repeatedly stressed. Sang Heon Um, Deputy Minister for Academic Research Policy in the Republic of Korea quoted an African proverb: “if you want to go first, go alone; if you want to go fast, go together.” Korea, he said, was a good model as well as a good partner for Africa as a country with few natural resources which formerly depended heavily on overseas funding. Strategic investment in education largely accounts for the country’s economic success.. Warm applause greeted his proposal to enlarge cooperation with African countries in higher education.
Building partnerships between institutions, both inside and outside Africa was also stressed along with the need to develop regional centres of excellence. There were two significant announcements in this regard. The first concerned the creation of a new Pan-African institution of university governance, based in Yaoundé, Cameroon, jointly launched by the Agence universitaire de la francophonie and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. The second concerned Brazil (“the biggest African country outside Africa” in the words of co-chair Ahlin Byll-Cataria, Executive Secretary, ADEA) which is building UNILAB, an Afro-Brazilian “network university” with eight campuses; five of them in of Portuguese-Speaking African countries and two others in Asia, and of course in Brazil itself.
Zeinab El Bakri, Vice-President, African Development Bank presented the bank’s interest in higher education as a means to regional integration. Strong regulation of funding was needed to avoid the growth of purely commercial institutions. Agriculture and natural resource management should be developed as specialities. Diversification was vital. ICTs must be further developed. Higher education must become a breeding ground for good governance, academic freedom and openness – all relatively neglected areas. The bank notably supported the development of centres of excellence.
One example is the International Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering (2iE) in Burkina Faso which trains highly skilled professionals in the areas of water, energy, environment, and infrastructure engineering - vital fields for Africa's development. Amara Essy, President of the 2IE Foundation took pride in the fact that 80 percent of graduates find work immediately, stressed the importance of good governance and pointed out that “Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, yet we sell distance learning programmes to developed countries”.
Isabelle Glitho, dean of the science faculty at the University of Lomé in Togo, showed the benefits of networking for women and science, pointing to an initiative in which five universities from Western Africa have joined forces to work in issues related to water management.
Encouraging the production of indigenous knowledge is indispensable to meet the continent’s development challenges. “The term ‘knowledge society’ means two different things in developed and developing countries: one is the producer and one is the consumer”, said Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education and Training, South Africa. Speaking on behalf of the 53-member conference of Education ministers in Africa he delivered some pithy observations on the challenges facing the Second Decade of Education for Africa: lack of access to indigenous knowledge (as “there had been no significant break with the colonial era”); gender imbalance, especially at the leadership level, and the interconnected challenges of gender, racial and ethnic discrimination.
Mr Nzimande criticized the overemphasis on basic education to the detriment of higher education. “Education must not be approached in an atomized or fragmented manner but in a holistic manner”. While he believed that academic freedom was under threat, and that governments needed to guarantee it, responsibility for academic freedom went both ways and institutions had to be accountable too.
Policies also have to pay more heed to the social condition of students. Robert Sangaré, president of a prominent francophone university association, noted that “quality and efficiency in higher education go hand in hand with providing social support to students,” noting that many students experienced considerable financial difficulties in pursuing their studies.
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