“Education, and higher education in particular, is
the fulcrum and pivot upon which all other developments rest and rotate around.
In the words of Andrew Carnegie, 'Upon no foundation but that of popular
education can a man erect the structure of an enduring civilization'”
– Professor
Olugbemiro Jegede, Sec. General, Association of African Universities, 2012
Abstract
We describe the
general context for the economic environment of Africa. We begin broadly, but
we highlight the unique obstacles in ICT sector development that result from
the current higher education system. We
discuss the current challenges in higher education and we argue that tertiary
education can sustain market-driven growth, especially in the ICT sector, if
governments, universities, and their partners improve access to and the quality
of higher education using new and innovative approaches to develop the sector.
Finally, while
there are no easy answers or blueprints we elaborate on five focal points that
offer simple and inexpensive techniques to improve higher education outcomes
across the continent. While we are
focusing on Higher Education in Science and Technology (HEST), most of our
recommendations can be adopted more broadly for other subjects of study.
While this paper
addresses the problem on a continental level, we are conscious that every African
country faces its own set of distinctive challenges and opportunities.
Africa’s Booming
Economy
Business
in Africa is getting serious [1]. The continent's markets have grown at
unprecedented rates for the past decade; a consumer class with significant
purchasing power is forming [2]. At a time where Europe and the United States
are in a more-or-less chronic state of stagnation (recent EU numbers declared a
second recession in just four years [3], and the US is still trying to recover
convincingly from the financial crisis of recent years [4]), Standard & Chartered
bank forecasts that Africa's economy will grow at an average annual rate of 7%
over the next 20 years, slightly faster than China's [5].
Opportunities
abound for foreign investors and African entrepreneurs alike [6]. But there is
a consensus that, while they certainly form key parts of the picture, growth in
the region has to be about more than oil and minerals, and will require more
than just highways and factories. In 2010, Howard W. French of Columbia
University concluded that: “All things considered, resource-based or
infrastructure-driven development [...] appear unlikely to lead to a meaningful
African renaissance" [7].
In
particular, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be a powerful
tool to boost economic growth by increasing efficiency, providing access to new
markets or services, and creating new opportunities for income generation. “ICT enables economic growth by broadening
the reach of technologies such as high-speed Internet, mobile broadband, and
computing; expanding these technologies itself creates growth, and the fact
that technologies make it easier for people to interact and make workers more
productive creates additional benefits.” [8] The impact of ICT can be even
more dramatic in Africa where its use is still emerging. It is estimated that
even a 10% increase in broadband penetration can deliver a 0.1 - 1.4% boost in
GDP [9].
Africans believe so too. South African Deputy
President Kgalema Motlanthe addressing leading ICT enterprises at an ICT
conference in Cape Town in June 2012
said that “while primary or traditional
industries remained important, the biggest commodity in the world today is
knowledge, and the ability to generate, access, and distribute knowledge have
become key determinants for a higher developmental trajectory for any nation.
African countries can provide the innovators for future technological
development in ICT that can in turn continue to drive economic and social
development on the continent, through developing innovations and applications
relevant to the needs of our peoples."
Africa’s Workforce’
Skill Gap
Africans
are innovative and familiar with the problems they face in their own
environment; much more so than Westerners. The problem is not lack of
innovation, but rather lack of skills.
Human
capital is freely available on the continent in the shape of a huge young, but
largely unskilled, workforce. Increasingly highly skilled labor is required as
the African market mature and grows – labor that is in short supply on the
continent. In 2012, global HR specialists Going Global reported that "More
than half of South African CEOs report it is becoming increasingly difficult to
recruit workers and the shortage of skilled candidates is the most significant
recruitment challenge" [10]. A 2011 report by Dahlberg for the
Initiative for Global Development "Pioneers on the Frontier: Sub-Saharan
Africa's multinational corporations (MNC)" [11] echoes the skilled labor
supply-demand gap challenge for MNCs operating in the region. In most sub-Saharan
African countries, about two-thirds of all young workers in the labor market—95
million people—lack the basic skills needed to be competitive in the labor
force [12].
Specifically,
the continent faces a dire challenge when it comes to well-trained professionals
in science and technology. While about 50 percent or more of students enrolled
in tertiary educational institutions in fast growing countries such as Korea,
China, and Taiwan are enrolled in science, engineering, technology (SET) or
business, only about 20 percent of tertiary education students in Africa are
enrolled in these subjects [13]. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are only 83 scientists
and engineers engaged in R&D for every 1 million people compared to about
1,000 to 1,500 in the developed world [14]. The disparity is enormous.
The ICT Challenge
In
spite of a sluggish world economy, the demand for skilled ICT engineers and developers
remains high outside of Africa [15]. According to a 2013 report by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, in the US there will be two jobs available per every
graduate with a computer science degree over the next ten years [16], pushing a
substantial number of African students to travel overseas in search of quality
education to obtain ICT-related degrees and jobs. But only 30 percent of
Africans studying abroad return to the region after graduation [17] to the
detriment of African start-ups and investors looking to implement projects on
the continent. Moreover, the degree they obtain overseas may not be
particularly well suited to the challenges faced in Africa, reducing the
probability that they will return. Expressed differently, over 20,000 qualified
Africans have worked abroad every year since 1990 [18]. Developed countries are
thus hosting more than 1 million Africans holding higher education degrees. To
fill the human resource gap created by this brain drain, Africa employs up to
150,000 expatriate professionals at a cost of 4 billion dollars per annum [19].
As
a consequence, despite Africa’s largely endogenous growth, Africans are not
reaping as many rewards from the plentiful opportunities on the continent as
they could, in particular in the ICT sector.
To
elaborate, let us review Africa’s experience inventing mobile money. While the
idea of M-PESA, a mobile money system, was born in Kenya by Kenyan innovators,
the technology is owned by Vodaphone, a British Company. Vodaphone managed
M-PESA’s technological development by outsourcing the job to Sagentia, a global
innovation, technology and product development company in Cambridge, UK; rather
than developing the product locally amid its inventors. Eventually Vodaphone
tasked Safaricom, a Kenyan telecommunications corporation, with the operational
management and commercialization of the product, but ultimately Vodaphone
collects the royalties.
M-PESA
is simply one example of Africa’s endogenous innovations. Much has been written
about the revolutionary impact of cell phones that enabled Africans to
technologically leap-frog. The continent has overcome the challenge of limited
infrastructure by attaining connectivity on a par with any developed country, seemingly
overnight [20]. That same handset driven revolution continues to push the
envelope by enabling mobile banking, mobile agriculture, and mobile healthcare applications
in countries such as Kenya, Niger and Senegal, and unique innovative applications
tailored to meet African needs for information sharing and transactions to
thrive.
Unfortunately
Western companies, mostly MNCs, are the ones who profit from these
technological developments since the innovators are ill-equipped to capture
their brain-children’s promise of profit. The ICT market in Africa seems to
replicate the old colonial relationship between Africa and the Western world.
During colonial times, the metropolis exploited Africa by importing natural
resources from colonies and exporting finished manufacturing goods or selling
unsustainable factories. Now the developed countries import human resources and
innovations from Africa and export hardware and software developed by their
global IT companies, often selling solutions that are inappropriate for the
region and that require expatriate resources to implement and maintain.
Apart
from lacking resources, it is the skills gap between Africa’s ICT professionals
and those in the West that obstruct Africans from reaching their full
technological development and profit potential. Vodaphone was able to take
ownership of M-PESA because local companies could not access the appropriate
human capital and other resources that could build the technology beyond its
initial inception.
The Role of Higher Education
in Africa’s Economic Development
Higher
education has a unique and important role to play in resolving the skills gap
in Africa. A Harvard University study published in 2006 by Bloom et al
("Higher Education and Economic Development in Africa") [21] was
among the first to document the importance of tertiary education on economic
growth and poverty reduction. Building on that research, UNESCO in 2006
declared that: "Expanding
higher education contributes to promoting faster technological catch-up, improving
a country's ability to maximize output and decrease the knowledge gap and
poverty in the region. There seems to be an increasing recognition of a
positive contribution of higher education to economic development, and there is
a strong case for expanding the base of tertiary education in the developing
world." [22]
After
years of explicitly steering funding away from universities in favor of primary
education, the World Bank in 2009 concluded that, "[...] maximizing productivity and achieving competitiveness
will depend upon success in augmenting human capital and raising its quality.
The key to economic success in a globalized world lies increasingly in how
effectively a country can assimilate the available knowledge and build
comparative advantage in selected areas with good growth prospects, and in how
it can enlarge the comparative advantage by pushing the frontiers of technology
through innovation." [23] Everyone, it seems, at last
agrees that higher education plays a pivotal role in sustaining growth and
development.
Quantity and
Quality Gaps in Higher Education
Higher
education outcomes in Africa leave much to be desired from the institutions
charged with delivering educational excellence. As discussed above, many graduating
jobseekers do not have the skills that industries seek in candidates. The
problem is twofold: higher education in Africa suffers in terms of quantity and
quality.
Quantity
wise, Africa has one university for every 1.2 million people. In comparison,
the number of inhabitants per university in North America is 100K, in Europe it
is 125K, in Latin America 105K, and in Asia 572K [24]. At best, higher
education in Africa is 2 times less accessible than in Asia. At worst, the
continent’s higher education is more than 12 times less accessible than in
America. We know that 65% of Africa's population is less than 25 years old and
therefore demographic pressure further exacerbates the chasm.
In
2008 the World Bank noted that only 5 percent of the relevant age group in
Africa attends university, compared to the world average of 25 percent. In a
2009 speech to the Africa-US Higher Education Initiative Partners Conference,
National University of Rwanda Rector Silas Lwakabamba declared: "We all recognize that basic education is
indeed important. However, it is also
increasingly evident to policy makers and educators that a sustained focus on
higher education is necessary to achieve a 10% [university] graduation rate – a
minimum for any country to ensure the possibility of sustainable development"
[25].
A
2010 follow-up report from the World Bank [26] examined the financing of higher
education in Africa. It is the only region in the world that has experienced a
decrease in the volume of current expenditure per student by 30 percent in the
last 15 years. This is mainly due to the dramatic increase in the number of
students that could not be matched by public expenditures. This growth is
fueled by demographics and the Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) focus on
primary and secondary education. Between 1991 and 2006, the number of students
in higher education more than tripled, rising from 2.7 million to 9.3 million.
This was an annual increase of about 16%, but public resources for expenditure only
grew by 6%, and the same report concluded that "in most Sub-Saharan African countries, enrollment in higher education
has grown faster than financing capabilities, reaching a critical stage where
the lack of resources has led to a severe decline in the quality of instruction
and in the capacity to reorient focus and to innovate. Public funding in most
countries is already overstretched, and alone it will not be sufficient to
respond to the growing demand for access to higher education while delivering a
level of quality that provides students with the skills necessary to succeed in
current and future labor markets."
Quality
wise, there are only three African universities in the “Academic Ranking of
World Universities” of the top 500 best universities in the world, and all
three are from South Africa. To have an idea of the ranking of Sub-Saharan
African universities (not including South Africa) we must rely on automated
rankings like Webometrics. In that
ranking, the first university from sub-Saharan Africa emerges 1080th,
indicating a significant gap in quality of higher education in that region.
To
provide quality instruction and research, one significant measure of the
capability of the professoriate is doctoral-level certification. In Africa,
doctoral-level faculty are the minority, sometimes with percentages as low as
20%. In addition, studies have shown a disturbing trend at several universities
of a slide in the proportion of academic staff with doctoral degrees, and an
increase in the proportion of staff with only a bachelor’s degree, symptomatic
of the further decline of the quality of African universities [27].
When
the “sage on stage” is relatively unqualified to teach complicated material, it
is no wonder that education is often limited to the first two stages of the
Bloom's classification of cognitive skills. Bloom identified 5 stages of
cognition, or in other words, critical thinking: remember, understand, apply,
analyze, evaluate and create. In many African schools, students are expected to
only reach the first two stages and are thus evaluated based on their capacity
to remember and repeat the content of the course. That rote learning, while useful
for some topics, is devastating in engineering education. Bloom’s
classification promotes additional next higher forms of thinking in education:
applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating rather than just remembering
facts. Identifying and solving problems, thinking critically, developing
creative solutions, these additional skills are critical to develop a
generation of innovators and entrepreneurs but they require different and
adapted teaching methodologies and higher faculty to student ratios in order
for students to be able to develop those skills.
The
apex of Bloom’s cognition classification is “creating.” In the engineering and
ICT context, students should be challenged to create semi-complex and relevant
projects. However, as a graduate school professor I have learned that my
students who were once enrolled in bachelor-level programming language courses
(e.g. a C or Java course) have reported that their most complicated assignments
were in fact ridiculously simple. For instance, assignment projects included:
“Write a program that simulates a calculator” or “Write a program that prints
‘Hello!’ on the screen.” Ultimately, professors fail to task students to solve
even a single real business related problem that stimulates their critical
thinking and creativity.
Insufficient
resources also hamper ICT teachers and students’ ability to deliver and receive
high quality education. My students explained that oftentimes they have no
access to a PC or five students share a single PC. As a result, many students
may graduate from a programming language course without ever running a program
on a computer. This is like learning to swim by book without ever jumping into
the pool.
In
addition, ICT curriculum content is often outdated and not adapted to the business
needs in the region. For instance, many IT departments in universities teach
artificial intelligence (AI) courses, copying the curriculum directly from
Western universities [28]. One wonders what AI can do to address Africa's
problems? Yet at the same time, you rarely find courses on mobile and wireless technology
or mobile software development, although both are critical for Africa. During a
recent visit to a school of computer science in a major South African
university, one faculty recognized that their curriculum had been unchanged for
the last 20 years!
In
summary, difficult access and poor quality of higher education combine to
create major disadvantages for the development of Africa. There is a profound
mismatch between the degrees offered and the skills required by the African
labor market. All of this should be seen in light of the extremely high rates
of unemployment in Africa, even for those with university degrees. Collier and
others write extensively about the implications of youth - often male -
unemployment on social unrest; it should be a significant consideration for a
continent all-too-familiar with conflict.
Limitations of
Existing Traditional Approaches
Government
with Foreign Aid
Governments
are often facing the impossible challenge of addressing the quantity problem of
university access while at the same time improving quality of education.
Attempts have of course been made to address the issues surrounding higher
education in Africa. While the bulk of economic activity on the continent
remains untaxed, African governments have recently started seeing a sustainable
tax base from business activities [29]. This offers some discretionary funding
to spend on higher education, but unfortunately there are a multitude of
competing demands made on limited funds. Ultimately, other investment choices
are persistently deemed as higher priorities than tertiary education.
Besides
taxes, other attempts have been made to address the issues surrounding higher
education funding in Africa. Ultimately, the source of most of Africa’s higher
education funding is foreign aid from foundations, trusts, grants, etc. (e.g.
the "Partnership for Higher Education in Africa" initiative that
invested $440M in higher education from 2000-2010). But often they come with
strings attached. Governments endure significant external pressure from aid
agencies that inhibit their ability to freely choose where they may spend their
borrowed budgets. The MDGs aim to ensure
that by 2015 children everywhere – boys and girls alike – will complete a full
course of primary schooling. But the MDGs fall silent on the issue of higher
education, which pressures governments to allocate funds towards primary,
rather than university, education. This, coupled with a history of IMF-imposed
structural adjustments programs funneling funding away from higher education
towards basic education as part of debt forgiveness programs, helps explain why
funding for higher education has declined steadily over the past decade as
enrollment increases substantially.
One
might also argue that the funds made available for higher education are
misallocated. Governments concentrate on the quantity problem of university
access. Most investments are directed at real estate and university and
technology center construction has become a flourishing business in Africa.
Announcement of mega tech city projects are popping up from Kenya to Ghana [30].
But the quantity gap is so significant that it cannot be solved in the short or
medium term and it should not be addressed at the cost of quality. In fact
priority should be given to quality. But addressing the quality issues is
tougher than building universities and the political pay-off is arguably lower.
Yet those quantity investments will be wasted and result in empty buildings and/or
contribute to a growing unemployable workforce if the quality problem is not
addressed. If governments would only divert a small percentage of the $billions
they are planning to invest in those mega projects, they could at least start
addressing the quality gap. It would require hiring of highly killed faculty, updating
curriculum, etc. to address problems identified earlier.
Private
Entities
Due
to the pressure of the demand for more universities and the difficulty of
government to support the investment needed,
private universities have flourished across the continent as a
supplement to the government-run tertiary education system [22]. Some of them
are local initiatives; others are partnerships with foreign schools. In this
latter case, most often the private university is a partnership with a European
or American university leveraging their brand to attract students. However the
quality of education is often inferior to the quality of the Western partner
university. The imported curriculum is taught by local instructors with the
support of visiting professors. The latter only come to Africa for short
periods of time, inhibiting their ability to understand the real needs of the
region and integrate these needs, and creative teaching techniques, to
exemplify and solve them in the imported curriculum. Also, in part because it
is cheaper and easier for these private entities to educate humanities
graduates rather than e.g. engineers, they increase the gap in HEST.
New innovative approaches
It
seems that traditional education approaches are entrenched in a long history of
failure in the region. They fail to deliver a quality education and fight a losing
battle to close the higher education quality gap between Africa and the rest of
the world.
It
is obvious that new approaches are required. “The traditional structure, in which universities supplied the entire
value chain from knowledge-generation to course delivery, is breaking down.
Instead, specialized players are emerging. Knowledge generation is very costly
and only well-endowed schools or schools that have access to sufficient public
funds can afford that ‘stage of production’” [31]. A new paradigm of
government-industry partnerships in the realm of education involving companies
and organizations to fill critical skilled shortages in Africa may offer an
opportunity to improve higher education quality delivery and close the quality
gap [32].
New
partnerships, and the innovative institutions they produce, implicitly or
explicitly promote the more sophisticated strata espoused in Bloom’s cognition
model. They also engage the private sector to develop closer linkages between
industry and education, ensuring that improvements in higher education have
direct positive impacts on local economies. In tandem, they support the
integration of students into the regional workforce, resulting in high
employment rates of their graduates. By raising the bar for higher education
they can make a significant contribution towards a renaissance in Africa.
We
are here highlighting a non-exhaustive list of three such partnerships. The
first of these partnerships elicited Centers of Excellence (CoE). In October
2007, the Connect Africa Summit recommended the establishment of five CoEs in
each sub-region of Africa to support the development of a critical mass of
science and technology skills required for the development of the continent. As
a HEST strategy, CoEs deliver tertiary and vocational training on a regional
basis.
Rwanda
is spearheading the initiative for the East Africa Community with the opening
of an ICT CoE in Kigali with financial support from African Development Bank.
In order to fulfill this ambitious goal, the Government of Rwanda strategically
targeted Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish and operate a master's
degree-granting program in Rwanda because of CMU's strong culture of research
and innovation [33]. This is the first time that a world class university is
opening a campus in Africa with onsite presence (as opposed to online courses)
and resident CMU faculty assigned to Rwanda from Pittsburgh (as opposed to
visiting professors). The uniqueness of this ICT COE project is its integration
with the development of an ICT industry in the region through functions like an
innovation incubator, a mobile research center and executive education
programs. Other CoEs are being established in Tunisia and Mali.
Alongside
Rwanda, Ghana is on the frontier of higher education innovation. Ghana’s Ashesi
University is the first university in the country to adopt and blend the
Liberal Arts method of education with majors in Computer Science, Management
Information Systems and Business Administration. Its goal is to educate African
leaders of exceptional integrity and professional ability: “An Ashesi student is able to apply critical
thinking and quantitative reasoning to approach complex problems, demonstrates
skills in data analysis and modeling, sees things from multiple perspectives,
and has awareness of a broad range of concepts and ideas that have personal,
local and global significance”.
Ghana’s
Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) leverages the experience
of business executives and professionals through an “alternative education”
approach. MEST’s entrepreneurial program
is designed around three phases: training, incubation and mentorship. At MEST,
these experienced professionals successfully train young students to become
software entrepreneurs, fulfilling their vision to “create wealth and jobs
locally in Africa.”
The
major challenge for these new innovative approaches is to deliver world class
quality education while being sustainable to reduce dependency on donor funding.
An
example of such a successful sustainable institution is the International
Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering in Burkina Faso. It was
created 40 years ago, it is accredited in Europe and its engineering degrees
are internationally recognized, and more than 95 % of their students find a job
within six months of graduating. “This
unique rate in Africa is the result of a factor combination: the quality of our
training programs, our partnership strategy with companies, backbone for an adequate
training of qualified human resources adapted to the market needs, and finally our
aim to offer solutions that meet the continent challenges.”
And
one more option has now come online it seems -- literally -- in the form of
distance learning or the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). While MOOCs are
making the buzz these days, they are subject to some healthy skepticism [34]
particularly about their value for Africa where they face major challenges like
inappropriate language, affordability of required hardware and Internet access,
hardware malfunctions, power outages, intermittent Internet connectivity, and
inadequate bandwidth.
More
importantly, more than others, African students are looking for role models and
inspiring teachers that cannot be provided by technology only. However ICT
offers the opportunity to overhaul access to resources and change the nature of
the teacher-student interaction. “Soon
faculties will be lecturing less and tutoring more, along the lines of the
‘flipped classroom’ model in which students are assigned videos and online
materials for their homework, and come to class in order to discuss what they
saw with their teachers” [31]. This should allow learning to move from the
“sage on stage” model to higher level of cognitive skills in the Bloom’s model.
Focal Points for
Improving Higher Education Outcomes
Innovations
in higher education are taking shape in isolated pockets throughout Africa. There
have been many studies published about improving higher education in Africa,
several of them referred to in this paper. But clearly, African universities
and governments could also benefit by taking advantage of “low hanging fruit,”
or simple and inexpensive methods for improving higher education outcomes
across the continent. The following five proposals are just that: suggestions
for process changes and measurement methodologies that double as tools for
improvement. These proposals are neither complex nor expensive; and although we
focus on HEST, they could be used more generally.
The
five proposals are as follows:
1)
Improving teacher effectiveness
Most
universities in the US have teaching excellence centers where faculty and
instructors can get support and training to help them improve as teachers. The
centers’ staff people collaborate with instructors to design and implement
meaningful educational experiences for students that leverage innovative
teaching methodologies and technologies. In particular, they organize
orientation programs for new incoming faculty to ensure consistent teaching
quality in the university. Finally, these centers also train faculty to be
quality monitors for their colleagues. Each faculty is then required to be
monitored by one of his peers once a year with the purpose of providing
positive feedback for helping him/her improve his/her teaching.
Governments
should dedicate part of their investment to support the creation of such
teaching excellence centers in each university. Universities should also
provide attractive and motivating salaries to those faculties who demonstrate
improved quality teaching through these trainings. Quality improvement can also
come from the diaspora academics who return to Africa attracted by the fast
growing economy and the development of the IT market [35].
2)
Feedback for course improvement
Aside
from measuring students, universities should develop mechanisms to improve the
quality of courses taught by its faculty members. Several websites exist that
allow students to rate their instructors, such as “rate a prof” or “rate my
professors”. Some media are even using data from those websites to publish a
list of schools with the worst professors! Here we need to be cautious as it is
difficult for those websites to identify sincere from fake ratings. The last
thing you want is for a student to vindicate his/her (maybe rightfully) low
grade by trashing the grading professor on those sites.
Instead,
we would recommend for each university to introduce their own similar rating
systems such that students registered for a course are given the opportunity to
rate that course after they received their final grade for that course. Most
universities in the US have such a system in place. At Carnegie Mellon
University students are invited at the end of each semester to rate the courses
they attended on a voluntary and anonymous basis. What is important here is
that the result be used not to penalize individual professors but rather to
help them improve the quality of their teaching by learning from student
feedback. This can also be used by academic committees to promote outstanding
professors and encourage others to improve their teaching quality, potentially
inviting them to “teaching excellence” seminars. For these systems to be successful
they should be implemented with the voluntary collaboration of the faculty
themselves and the results from course surveys and their use for course
improvement need to be communicated back to the students [36].
3)
Engaging industry in curriculum development
Any
university must have a curriculum review committee who determines course
offerings for any given academic program. These review committees are usually comprised
of professors and department heads who review program and course criteria from
a solely academic perspective. University
schools should also have an advisory board made of representatives from private
sectors that correspond to the fields of instruction. The curriculum review committees
should then share their curriculum information with and get advice from the
advisory board made of private sectors representatives- the people who
ultimately would recruit the students. In that way curriculum review will
involve department heads, professors and private sector representatives; they
will then include the individuals managing the educational institution, the
instructors delivering the material, and the professionals who ultimately would
recruit the students after the program. They could influence curricular content
in an effort to endow today’s students (and tomorrow’s workers) with the skills
necessary to strike equilibrium between the labor supply and labor demand in
their industry. We realize this may be a controversial suggestion for
traditional academics, but at this stage Africa cannot afford the luxury of
universities delivering graduates who cannot be employed immediately because
they lack necessary industry skills.
Another
approach to better integrate industry needs with academic education is for
professors to get more involved with private sector people. The ultimate
objective is to provide students with the opportunity not only to learn, but
also practice what they learn. This can be done in different ways: inviting
private sector guest speakers in their courses, organizing "real"
internships for students in local and regional businesses, asking industry for
problem ideas that can be used in class for students to address, and so many
others.
4)
Aptitude Testing
The
Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is an aptitude testing tool. It is intended
to measure some individual characteristics that are important for graduate
study: reasoning skills, critical thinking, and the ability to communicate effectively
in writing. These are some of the higher cognitive skills from the Bloom’s
model that we identified earlier as lacking in Africa’s higher education. We
acknowledge that there are many other different criteria for success in
graduate education that are not measured by GRE such as motivation, creativity,
interpersonal skills, subject matter knowledge, financial support, etc.
The
GRE test has been used for many years and has improved over time to a point
where it is now recognized as valuable graduate admission criteria by most
universities. The test is managed by independent organizations guaranteeing the
fairness of its results.
Some
people will argue that these tests are not appropriate for African students. I
reject the notion that African students should receive simplified tests. This
test is taken by students from all regions, and rather than lowering standards
for Africans, we should help African students raise their skills to a globally
competitive level. One of the advantages of these tests is that students around
the world take them to gain admission to American universities and the best
universities in Europe. This will allow Africa to compare its students to the
best students in the world. There is no reason why African students cannot
compete against others if we can improve the quality of higher education in
Africa.
One
challenge here is that the cost of these tests can be prohibitive for
individual students. Perhaps these costs
could be integrated in the university tuition. Another challenge will be to
familiarize students with these tests during their studies to get prepared. There
is a lot of literature available out there with tutoring material for these
tests and that can be used for tutoring at the university.
How
then should we use the results of these tests? Few countries in Africa have
functioning national learning assessment systems, depriving policymakers of the
flow of information needed to guide reform. By integrating the GRE test at the
end of undergraduate SET education, it can provide some measure of the
students’ abilities evaluated by the test like reasoning and critical thinking
skills. The aggregate statistics of all GRE scores from graduating students
from one university can then be used to monitor university progress year after
year
Obviously,
the result of these GRE tests can also be used by students to apply for
graduate studies in universities worldwide.
5)
Organize and mobilize alumni networks
Alumni
organizations are well developed in American universities. They serve many
purposes: develop a network of alumni that can be tapped into by graduating
students for employment support, by the university for fund raising, and for
other purposes.
Alumni
organizations were not possible in Africa in the past as they required good
communication structure that was either lacking or too costly in Africa. ICT
and social networks have now reduced that cost to almost zero.
While
African universities can use it for the same functions, my suggestion is
slightly less conventional. Africa cannot afford to continue investing in
universities that deliver students that are unprepared to work in the country,
let alone the regional economy. Alumnus networks can be used to track the
employment of students after they graduate. Statistical data can then be easily
collected to show the percentage of students finding jobs over the years after
graduation, the level of income they earn, and the types of jobs they are hired
for. This, in turn, can be made publicly available granting some monitoring of
the data to prevent fraud. It will help parents to identify and select the best
university studies for their sons and daughters.
These
are not magic bullets, but the advantage of these ideas is that they have no or
small costs associated with them, they are easy to implement and can only
improve the situation.
Conclusions
Africa’s
higher education is facing the challenge to
“respond to the growing demand for access to higher education while delivering
a level of quality that provides students with the skills necessary to succeed
in current and future labor markets" [26].
In particular, the skills gap is significantly impacting the development of
an ICT industry in the region. If not addressed, it will increase Africa’s
dependence on the Western world at a critical time. Indeed the West is no
longer the sole source of technological breakthroughs, and the West is no
longer the dominant growth market for ICT. In fact, many people are now saying
that Africa is the place where there will be an explosion in technological
markets and innovation that will outpace anything that has been seen before
anywhere else in the world.
The
technological breakthroughs that are going to be the foundations of the ICT
industry in Africa will come from inventors and entrepreneurs who work in
Africa and understand the technological challenges and needs that are unique to
Africa. More than ever before, now is the time and the opportunity for Africans
to control their future in this ICT industry before someone else does it. There
are many "someone else’s" vying for the same market but Africans
should not fear that competition because this time they have the home field
advantage but quality higher education is the required road to success.
Michel Bézy
Kigali,
September 3rd, 2013
[14] “Voice
for the World's Poor: Selected Speeches and Writings of World Bank President
James D. Wolfensohn”, 1995-2005, May 2005, p 524: Merging Global Knowledge with
Local Knowledge, Remarks by James D. Wolfensohn, World Bank President at the
Knowledge Economy Forum in Abuja, Nigeria, January 30, 2005
[24]
These numbers have been calculated based on the number of universities per
region from Webometrics and population from Worldstat Info.
[26]
World Bank, “Financing Higher Education in Africa”, Directions in
Development: Human Development, April
21, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-8213-8334-6
[28] M.
Chetty, C. Buckhalter et all, “Description of Computer Science Higher Education
in Sub-Saharan Africa: Initial Explorations”, Georgia Institute of Technology,
2007. Available: https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/20060
[34] G.
Sharma, “A MOOC Delusion: Why Visions to Educate the World Are Absurd”, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 15, 2013
