There’s need to put Africa’s higher education in order

By Francis Kokutse, in Accra, Ghana 

Francis Kokutse is a journalist based in Accra and writes for Associated Press (AP), University World News, as well as Science and Development.Net. He was a Staff Writer of African Concord and Africa Economic Digest in London, UK.

Higher education, which others simply refer to as university education, is  important to development. Unfortunately, it has been overlooked by African leaders. What is seen all over is the concentration of efforts on basic and secondary education.

Sierra Leone’s minister of basic and senior education, David Sengeh, sees nothing wrong with the attempts to improve basic education, and says these efforts are necessary because many students seem to be entering universities without a strong foundation.

“Improving basic education will transform education at all levels. Many more students will be able to benefit from the system throughout their educational journey if they get the foundations right at an early age,” Sengeh said.

Commenting on the Foundational Learning Exchange (FLEX) summit, which was held in Freetown, Sierra Leone from 6-7 February, he said “today, too many students enter university without strong foundations.”

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), defines foundational learning as acquiring the basic literacy and numeracy skills. It is committed to reducing by half the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age ten, within seven years.

Sengeh debunked the notion that the expansion of the basic education sector has led to more people being denied university education because of limited facilities at the higher institutions and said, “it is a much better problem to have too many students wanting to go to university because they are passing their exams than too few”, adding that,  “Sierra Leone has expanded its university offering on the regional level, invested in technical and vocational training and is considering online options for tertiary education.”

In spite of Sengeh’s claims, it looks like there are still some cleaning works that must be done. Two years ago, the director of UNESCO’s multisectoral regional office, Salah Khaled, published a paper which said, with 48 countries and a population of over one billion, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is one of the largest regions in the world, with a current gross tertiary education enrollment ratio of a meagre 9.4 percent, well below the global average of 38 percent.

“Numbers of girls are more concerning, as they could excel at school but are then pulled out to marry or do home chores. The sector is plagued by huge capacity deficits and challenges that threaten its survival, sustainability, and contribution to the socio-economic development of the continent,” Khaled said.

He observed that the COVID-19 pandemic has put the education sector in general and higher education in particular in difficulty. However, it is the pandemic that has helped unveil the problems experienced by students, professors, and faculty alike, which in reality existed before the onset of the crisis.

The secretary general, Association of African Universities (AAU), Olusola Bandele Oyewole, seems to agree that the tertiary sector needs attention. He says insecurity in many countries in Africa have threatened higher education, adding that the countries have not been able to overcome political instability in some countries where mobility has been restricted making it difficult for young people who want to be in school.

“Beyond political instability, there are also cases of higher education instability in some countries which is a result of strikes among staff unions in universities. A typical example is Nigeria where for eight months some universities were closed, and this has affected their graduation rates as well as affected the future of the young people. For this reason, I can say political instability in Nigeria and Africa has affected educational mobility,” he explained.

The importance of higher education is reflected in Khaled’s words that it is “one of the key sectors that could contribute to economic growth and development in the increasingly global society, key to the comprehensive sustainable development of Africa.”

He said governments and non-governmental institutions have recently initiated several policies and models in an attempt to build quality higher education to develop Africa’s human capital, to positively respond to the global challenges. Despite these efforts, an observable gap still exists between higher education and the socio-economic development of Africa.

Khaled identifies these as the lack of investment by governments, which has gone on for decades and has meant the sector is not capable of responding to the immediate skills needs or supporting sustained productivity-led growth in the medium term.

He said low salaries of faculty, academic disruptions due to strikes, lack of research funding and laboratories or IT equipment, as well as limited autonomy, have been discouraging factors for qualified professors, or students, to stay in African universities.

In the words of Khaled, “a key consequence of underdeveloped higher education institutions is high rates of migration of talents out of Africa in pursuit of training and research, and rewarding job opportunities abroad.”

“We have also seen elite and senior government officials often compete on sending their children to the most prestigious universities in the US or Europe, while neglecting tertiary education in their own countries,” he said.

According to Khaled, the humanitarian crises on the continent have had a toll on its youth and said, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in sub-Saharan Africa hosts more than 26 percent (over 18 million) of the world’s refugees. This number has soared over the years, partly due to the ongoing crises in the Central African Republic, Nigeria, Cameroon, South Sudan, and Burundi to name a few. Millions of these refugees and IDPs were students, who are now deprived of any access to higher education, with large numbers of them engaging in negative coping mechanisms such as drug consumption, criminality, terrorism, and associating with non-state armed groups.

Recent gross enrolments at tertiary levels were estimated at nine percent (9%) in SSA compared to 42% in Middle East & North Africa; 52% in Latin America & the Caribbean, 70% in Europe & Central Asia and 86% in North America. Tertiary enrolment rates are particularly low, as low as less than three percent (3%), in many fragile countries such as Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad, and the Central African Republic.

In the Lake Chad Basin, for instance, Khaled said youth who have no opportunities to continue their education, have no alternative other than joining Boko Haram. Students in the Cameroon Anglophone region have been deprived of completing their secondary education since 2016, with no chance to ascend to university. They also have no alternative but to engage in juvenile delinquency, criminality and with non-state armed groups.

Khaled said a great number of these youths could have had the opportunity of accessing higher education via distance learning or mutual recognition systems of degrees. However, millions of these students lack ICT skills and equipment, or even connectivity or mobile coverage to facilitate their access to distance learning platforms and other learning opportunities. This situation has contributed to increased conflicts, terrorism, youth unemployment, poverty, criminality, and emigration attempts to Europe. In despair and hopelessness, thousands of youths find their tragic fate in deserts or drowning in the Mediterranean.

He said higher education is essential to produce the teachers of tomorrow. Just as teachers are the central pillar of any education system, quality teachers produce quality education, a pre-requisite for a vibrant higher education.

“To produce quality teachers with the needed competencies and skills, there is a need for a strong and quality higher education. An endless vicious circle in most countries, exacerbating the current pattern of skills production in Africa that do not match labour market demand or development needs, with choked public sector recruitment and a private sector struggling to find competent candidates,” he said.

Khaled also bemoaned the recent trend in African higher education with low percentage of graduates in areas of engineering, technology, mathematics, agriculture, health, and science, adding that, “currently, most African countries face shortages of human resources and capacity within these disciplines, often depending on expat expertise for basic development projects.”

In addition, he said women are increasingly underrepresented in higher education, in particular in the science and technology fields. While we come across more and more great success stories of highly educated women increasingly accessing corporate or public positions, women are generally contributing to the informal economy, small scale businesses.

He wonders how much they could help develop their businesses, and sub-Saharan Africa, if these women had access to secondary and tertiary education.

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