Regional

India’s Africa-Campus Plans Emerge

As part of an initiative to strengthen the country’s presence on the continent, India recently made a commitment to help establish a network of higher education and vocational training institutions in Africa. Those plans are beginning to take shape with an announcement that the first site is expected to open its doors in less than a year.

The African Union, which is carrying out the program with India, has chosen Burundi as the host nation of a university that will train professionals to plan and manage the growth of higher education. “We are planning to complete setting up this year and to start the first batch in the first quarter of 2012,” said R Govinda, Vice-chancellor of India’s state-run National University of Education Planning and Administration.

Govinda visited Burundi in January, almost at the same time that a delegation from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade was in Uganda to meet potential partners for a business school in the capital, Kampala. The India-Africa Institute of Foreign Trade, which will be set up over the next five years, will offer full-time and part-time MBA programs. Also in the planning stages is the India Africa Institute of Information Technology in Ghana, which will be developed with the help of Educational Consultants India, a state-run consulting firm.

The move to provide business, technical and scientific training, along with measures like a high-speed communication network for distance learning and telemedicine programs, is the result of the first India-Africa Forum Summit in April 2008, which was held by the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

– New York Times
February 14, 2011

Egypt

Academics Look to the Future

Following the collapse of President Hosni Mubarak’s government, professors and students—who played a vital role in the historic uprising—have begun planning for the future. While academics are focusing their expertise on the political-transition process and encouraging the authorities to carry out long-overdue educational reforms, student activists are vowing they will continue to organize and agitate until their demands are met.

Part of the reason why the Mubarak regime fell was the result of the country’s demographic pressures. Like most of its neighbors in the Arab world, Egypt has a disproportionally large youth population, with approximately 40 percent between the ages of 10 and 29, according to 2006 Census data. University enrollment has steadily increased, but the quality of that education has declined, leaving many young Egyptians with high expectations but few marketable skills.

At the same time, corruption, nepotism and unemployment have left many young Egyptians to consider emigration as their best option. A survey carried out last year by the Population Council, an international nongovernmental organization, found that the unemployment rate is 19 percent among Egyptians ages 18 to 24. The same survey showed that graduates of universities and secondary vocational schools make up 25 and 48 percent, respectively, of the unemployed.

The Egyptian authorities closed universities on January 26, postponing some exams, and reopened them on March 5. While the path of reform, or even the shape of the next government, is still far from clear, the name of Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel Prize winner, was on the lips of many protesters. He has spoken urgently of the need for educational reform. In a column in the International Herald Tribune in February, he wrote that “the education system, which is central to every Egyptian household’s hopes of progress, has deteriorated into a sad state that is far below Egypt’s standing in the world.”

Mr. Zewail returned to Egypt in February and may well be given the task of negotiating on the part of the protesters, or of advising the government on the reform process. He and other academics believe that the first priority is to bring more Egyptian scientists to world-class institutions for training and upgrading, with émigré scientists returning to Egypt when conditions allow for them to excel there.

– The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 13, 2011

University Reform Takes Shape

Less than a month after the ouster of president Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s higher education authorities began the process of granting long-sought-after independence to public universities. State police have begun leaving campuses and new student union elections will be held within months.

Presiding over his first meeting as Minister of Education, Ahmed Gamal Moussa told the Higher Council for Universities, which oversees academic institutions, that student unions will be dissolved and elections for new unions will be held within 60 days of re-opening universities after a month-long mid-year vacation. Previous student union elections were widely believed to have been rigged in favor of pro-Mubarak candidates.

Egypt’s 18 governmental universities reopened in early March after they were closed and final exams postponed following protests against President Mubarak in late January. Since then, all public universities have started replacing campus police with civilian guards. The move comes more than four months after a court ordered the police to leave universities, where they have been stationed since 1981. Lecturers and students have long complained that the presence of campus police infringed academic freedom and the constitution, which enshrines university independence.

Soon after classes restarted, however, students staged massive protests against the administrators of their institutions, demanding that they be sacked for being part of the former regime. Protests occurred at Cairo University, Egypt’s biggest, among others, with students demanding the resignation of top administrators considered former Mubarak puppets.

For more than 50 years, presidents of public universities in Egypt have been directly appointed by the head of the state. Newly drafted regulations will reportedly delegate those powers to a more democratic process, which includes student elections.

– University World News
March 6, 2011

Six Years Later, Minister Reinstated

Six years after he was removed from his post as Egypt’s education minister, law professor Ahmed Gamal Moussa was reappointed in February as the new minister of both education and higher education. As part of a major cabinet reshuffle days after unprecedented protests swept aside long-standing President Hosni Mubarak, the ministries of education and higher education were merged.

“I have no political ambitions. I just want to serve my country at this crucial time,” Moussa told the press after being sworn in.

He said that top of his list of priorities as minister of higher education was to enforce a court ruling issued last October ordering police guards out of public universities, where they had controversially been since the 1980s. Developing university education and academic life was another priority.

– University World News
February 27, 2011

Gambia

Private Medical University Begins Operations

The American International University (AIU), a private medical university, opened in February after approval by the Gambian government for an initial class of 25 students from the region. The university has a School of Medicine (five-year program), School of Dentistry (five-year program) and School of Pharmacy (four-year program).

The university, according to official sources, will be operating in collaboration with the University of The Gambia (UTG), with AIU’s visiting professors offering lectures to UTG students. In the initial class are students from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Lesotho, Senegal, as well as Gambia.

– The Daily Observer
February 1, 2011

Kenya

Reforms Look to Ease Unmet Demand for Higher Education

Calling for new university campuses to be created in rural areas and funding to be increased to help students with university costs, Kenya has announced plans to reform its higher education sector. The government’s National Strategy for University Education, to be implemented by 2015, calls for existing universities to set up campuses in strategic rural areas and to specialize in specific fields relevant to the local economy in mainly agricultural and tourism fields.

Demand for higher education has soared in Kenya over the last decade, with an ever increasing number of school-leavers qualifying for university places and hopeful to increase their opportunities and success in the labor market. But universities do not have nearly enough places to meet the demand.

The government plan has the potential to increase higher education access and ease the admissions crisis plaguing public universities. It will be supported by intensive investment in digital and distance learning that will enable students to pursue degrees through online learning – a trend already practiced on a small scale by several Kenyan universities. But the framers say the plan will only work if the government significantly increases funding for universities.

– University World News
March 12, 2011

Malawi

New Law will Regulate Private Providers

Malawi is getting ready to pass higher education legislation that will regulate the accreditation of private universities. Lawmakers are looking at ways to ensure that the growing number of students attending private universities can do so at institutions maintaining appropriate standards.

The proposed National Council for Higher Education Bill will be tabled in Parliament soon. It contains strict regulations for private universities and colleges that could see those operating unregistered institutions jailed for up to 14 years. The Bill gives powers to the Ministry of Education to shut down any private institution that fails to meet the new standards. Colleges and universities that are already registered will be given six months to apply to the council for accreditation. A private college or university will only be accredited after obtaining a one-year provisional registration certificate – a period within which it would not be allowed to enroll students.

If the bill is passed into law, accreditation assessment of a private university will be done every academic year, following the submission of an annual report on institutional activities and achievements. Critics have called for the registration criteria to extend to state-run institutions as well. In addition, they have questioned whether the one-year assessment period is long enough.

Students who attend private universities in Malawi are typically those that have been turned away from public universities. This is due to a controversial government quota system, where entry into higher education is determined by one’s place of origin, rather than based purely on merit. Last year, Malawi’s President Bingu wa Muthurika announced plans to build five more universities within a decade. He recently named a 17-member committee to spearhead this plan.

– University World News
February 13, 2011

Mauritius

Indian Universities Help Develop Mauritius as a Knowledge Hub

A number of private Indian universities are establishing campuses in Mauritius and helping the island nation off the African coast to realize its vision of transforming into an international hub for higher education.

Two of the largest private universities in India, the DY Patil Medical College and Amity University, are in the process of setting up campuses in Mauritius. The JSS Mahavidyapeetha, a Karnataka-based educational foundation, established the JSS Academy of Technical Education in Mauritius in 2006.

As private universities in India seek to expand to foreign shores, Mauritius appears to be a logical destination because of its proactive plans for expanding higher education to both domestic and international students. The government in the Indian Ocean island nation, with a population of 1.3 million, has placed a strong focus on education, which is free to college level and compulsory between the ages of five and 16 years, corresponding to the fifth year of secondary schooling.

Amity will begin enrolling students this year in a range of undergraduate and graduate programs in the fields of management, finance, hospitality and tourism, engineering and sciences, among others. The DY Patil Graduate School of Medicine was started in 2009 at Quatre-Bornes, with 28 local and international students. It is partnered with the University of Technology, Mauritius (UTM) and the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital for clinical training. The medical college offers a range of specializations.

– Sify
February 17, 2011

Nigeria

3 U.S.-Based Academics Appointed as Heads of New Universities

The Nigerian government recently established six new federal universities in an effort to meet the demand from secondary school leavers for higher education. Three of those universities are to be headed by Nigerian academics currently working as professors at American universities.

The new appointments follow the hiring two years ago of Professor Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah – then a lecturer at Western Illinois University – as vice-chancellor of the newly created Kwara University. One of the positive contributions of Na’Allah, which reportedly alerted the attention of President Goodluck Jonathan, is his track record in attracting a number of eminent Nigerian scholars in the Diaspora to return to Nigeria to work. So when the Nigerian government decided to create six new public universities, the president wanted to follow the Kwara University model.

President Jonathan, who holds a doctorate degree in zoology from Nigeria’s University of Port Harcourt, appointed three professors from the Diaspora as vice-chancellors in three of the six new universities. They are: Professor Bolaji Aluko of Howard University in Washington DC, appointed vice-chancellor of the Federal University, Utueke, in Beyelsa State; Professor Geoffreye Okogbaa of the University of Southern Florida, to head the Federal University, Wukari, in Taraba State; and Professor Mohammed Farouk of Florida International University, appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Kashere in Gombe State.

After many months of industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, the central and regional governments recently agreed to implement a new salary scale, which is reportedly one of the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. The immediate consequence is that Nigerian university lecturers abroad who are about to retire or have lost their jobs are increasingly keen to return home and take up university jobs in their native land.

– University World News
February 27, 2011

Sudan (South)

Universities in South to Reopen

South Sudan continues to move on after its successful independence referendum, announcing that its universities will reopen in mid-May this year. However, the Voice of America reports that the country’s universities need a lot of work before opening.

There are a total of five universities in the south, the largest in the capital, Juba. Three universities had shifted their operations to the north during the war and the southern government has brought most of the students back, but what they will find there is not yet clear. Classes were originally scheduled to start at the beginning of April, but the southern Ministry for Higher Education has moved the opening date to mid-May.

Officials estimate about 25,000 students registered at the five southern universities, though the ministry is not sure about the exact number. Some of the students were in the north when they registered and it is not certain that they will travel south to attend school. The government pays for food and in theory provides lodging, but the south lacks facilities for such a large number of students, a fact that has been cited as the main reason for the delay in starting classes.

Until the south’s independence in July, Sudan’s national government will pay to keep the schools running.  But after July, that arrangement will end and, according to Ukel, the southern government’s proposed budget for 2011 doesn’t include any money for the universities. Then also there’s the problem of teachers.  Almost 75 percent of the lecturers at southern universities are from the north and they are not likely to travel to the south to continue teaching for their schools.

– Voice of America
February 22, 2011