Regional

Scottish Online University Offers 250 Full Ride Scholarships

Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School has launched a new scholarship program offering 250 deserving students from across Africa the chance to earn a master’s degree in business administration from what is considered by many to be one of the world’s best online M.B.A programs. There are currently more than 8,000 students around the globe enrolled in the program. The program is already offered at a reduced price for students from Africa, India, or China.

“We wanted to establish an initiative to promote lifelong learning across the continent,” Professor Keith Lumsden, director of Edinburgh Business School, told The New York Times. “Africa needs assistance to help develop its full potential, and with these scholarships we are offering 250 individuals the chance to make a difference – not only to their own lives but to the wider communities around them.”

Chosen for their future potential, candidates eligible for the scholarship must not only demonstrate financial hardship, they also need to show how they plan to use their degrees to benefit their home communities after graduating.

Edinburgh has partnered with the Canon Collins Trust, an African educational charity, to help the university identify deserving candidates and handle the application process. The education-focused charity is also helping scholarship recipients build mentoring relationships with respected figures such as Graça Machel (wife to Nelson Mandela and veteran political activist) to help them follow their post-graduation community-improvement goals.

– New York Times
September 19, 2010

Has Foreign Development Money Helped African Universities?

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has published an analysis of the successes and failures of a 10-year, multi-million dollar effort by a group of U.S.-based foundations to stabilize and strengthen African universities.

The case study, released by Carnegie’s Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA) and prepared by an outside consultant, praises the effort for recognizing and publicizing the importance of higher education in the region, for strengthening some institutions, and for a generally successful collaboration among the foundations that was greater than the sum of its parts. But the report also identifies communication and management problems that arose among the partner foundations, the relative inadequacy of data produced to document the impact of the program, and the difficulty the partnership had in involving governments and other would-be collaborators. The report also offers recommendations to groups contemplating similar large-scale projects in the future.

The coordinating office of PHEA closed on 31 January 2010. Two retrospectives, Accomplishments of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, 2000-2010: Report on a decade of collaborative foundation investment, and the aforementioned Case Study of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa: Lessons from a Ten-Year Funder Collaborative offer insight into the success and failures.

– Carnegie Corporation
September 2010

Vietnam Looks to Build Educational Partnerships in Africa

Vietnam is looking to build new research and consulting partnerships with African nations. At a conference in Hanoi in August, “Vietnam-Africa: A cooperation for sustainable development,” Vietnamese officials announced they were sending educational, medical and agricultural consultants to Africa and encouraging African students and researchers to visit Vietnam. Vietnamese officials are describing this initiative as a model of South-South cooperation.

The research and consulting plans are part of a broader initiative designed to complement and reinforce Vietnam’s growing trade with Africa, which according to Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem increased from US$360 million in 2003 to US$2 billion last year.

Since the inaugural Vietnam-Africa forum in 2003, much of Vietnam’s consulting focus has been on improving farming techniques in Africa, especially as relates to rice cultivation. And many of the Vietnamese experts consulting in Africa are coming from academia. Meanwhile, a small but increasing number of African students from select countries are studying in Vietnam.

Data suggest Vietnam is in a better position than ever to share information and expertise with less developed countries. Vietnam’s annual gross domestic product grew by between 6 percent and 8 percent between 1990 and 2008, and by 2008 its literacy rate was 93 percent. The World Bank now considers Vietnam a lower middle-income country.

Of course, the Vietnamese angle is not exclusively philanthropic. With Vietnam’s rapid economic growth comes an increasing thirst for natural resources, of which Africa has a bounty. University World News suggests Vietnam is following a model established by China, which has been forging multilateral ties with governments across Africa for well over a decade, with handsome grants and development projects offered along the way.

– University World News
October 24, 2010

Egypt

One Scholar Responsible for U. of Alexandria’s World Class Ranking

Alexandria University placed 147th in this year’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings — just below the University of Birmingham and ahead of such academic powerhouses as Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (151st) or Georgetown in the United States (164th) —and the only Arab university among the top 200.

Ann Mroz, editor of the Times Higher Education newspaper, issued a statement congratulating the Egyptian university, adding that “any institution that makes it into this table is truly world class.”

But researchers who looked behind the headlines noticed that the list also ranked Alexandria fourth in the world in a subcategory that weighed the impact of a university’s research — behind only Caltech, M.I.T. and Princeton, and ahead of both Harvard and Stanford. The citations indicator accounts for 32.5 percent of the total weighting.

Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.

– The New York Times
November 15, 2010

Ethiopia

Ban on Distance Learning Lifted

Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Education has lifted its ban on distance education after a one-and-a-half month long negotiation with private institutions ended in agreement in October.

At the end of the last academic year, the ministry banned the teaching of distance education programs at both private and public institutions in the country due to quality concerns. Since then, 64 private institutions have been engaged in negotiations with the education minister, resulting in the lifting of the ban in late October.

The agreement, however, was made under a condition that private universities and colleges implement a government policy that forces them to outline their curriculum based on a strict 70 to 30 ratio between natural sciences and technology versus social sciences and humanity studies.

– Daily Ethiopia
October 27, 2010

Progress Made in Improving Higher Education, but Much Remains to be Done

At a recent conference on Ethiopian higher education in the capital Addis Ababa, the Minister of Education Demeke Mekonnen said that Ethiopia’s investment in higher education has been growing in recent years and reached 4.5 percent of its Gross Domestic Product this year, although he cautioned that there is much still to be done, especially as relates to quality.

Perhaps the most significant progress in higher education has come in expanding access. Kenichi Ohashi, Country Director for the World Bank Ethiopia office noted that student capacity at Ethiopia’s institutions of higher education has grown from 13,000 in the early 1990s to almost 185,000 today. The number of federal institutions has expanded from two to 23 in just over a decade and a further 10 are being planned. There are also 64 private institutions operating in the country, with an estimated 75,000 students currently enrolled in distance education programs.

However with increased capacity has come concerns over quality, and this has been the center of debate for many stakeholders and education officials in recent years. Also of concern is the still-low higher education participation rate. According to UNESCO statistics, just 3 percent of the relative age group attends higher education, which is well below the Sub-Saharan average of 6 percent.

– News Business Ethiopia
November 10, 2010

Nigeria

Six New Federal Universities

The Nigerian government has announced that six new universities will be established across the country, and begin teaching in fall 2011. A government committee is looking into where to establish each university to best meet unmet demand, and an initial report has suggested that the universities will be spread evenly across the country in states that do not already have a federal university. A total of N60 billion, N10 billion for each university, has been approved as the take-off grant, while an initial N1.5 billion each would soon be released for each of them.

– Leadership
November 16, 2010

Colleges Upgraded to Universities

The National Universities Commission (NUC) upgraded Rivers State College of Education to a University of Education in November, making it the 35th state university in the country.

With the construction of a new 200-acre campus for Rivers State University of Science and Technology (RUST), the new university of education will take over the present campus of RUST. The Rivers State College of Education had been affiliated to the University of Ibadan for many years, but will now issue degrees autonomously.

Also in November, Yaba College of Education (YABATECH) and Kaduna State Polytechnic (KADPOLY) were upgraded to degree awarding institutions. In announcing the upgrade of the polytechnics, the minister for education Kenneth Gbagi said that his government was looking into phasing out or upgrading all colleges of education in the country, a statement he later backtracked on.

– This Day
November 9, 2010

Zimbabwe

Plans Announced for South Korean Medical University

South Korea’s Africa Future Foundation has announced plans to build a private research-based medical university and information technology center in Zimbabwe at an estimated cost of US$60 million. The medical school, which will have a 250-bed teaching hospital, will be the first non-church linked private university in Zimbabwe. Currently there are seven public and four private universities in the country. Construction for the new university is expected to start within five months.

The four other private higher education institutions in Zimbabwe are the Africa, Solusi, Catholic and Women’s universities. Standards at state-run universities have been spiraling downwards, with some campuses barely operating because of lack of funding brought about by years of political instability and economic crisis.

A number of faculties at the University of Zimbabwe, the country’s oldest and largest institution, remain closed because of a shortage of lecturers. However, the government still has indefinite plans to construct three new public universities in line with its policy to have at least one university in each of the country’s 10 provinces.

– University World News
October 31, 2010