What is the current contribution of Africa’s higher education to development?
This contribution is mediated through and has outcomes in four broad areas.
Research. Africa’s higher education (AHE) provides the basis for the “big ideas,” “ev-idence base,” and “what works” demands of the development sector. Research within high-er education genhigh-erates the knowledge required to address issues like poverty, food securi-ty, disease, and climate and environmental change. More than 100,000 foreign experts are employed to address Africa’s problems, cost-ing about $4 billion a year, mostly from aid budgets. Much of this expertise could be more efficiently and sustainably provided if resourc-es were redirected to postgraduate training, research, and university capacity building within Africa itself (Hayter, 2015).
Professional and technical education. Train-ing professional engineers, health workers, teachers, public administrators and policy makers, technologists, and scientists whose work is crucial to improving people’s lives, is vital. The notion of pro-poor profession-alism has also gained a foothold. Teachers, engineers, architects, agronomists, and public sector professions have seen recent initiatives to advance the idea of “developmental” pro-fessionalism, responding to critical issues with a focus on social responsibility and ethics.
Democracy and good governance. AHE is important in educating professional public journalists, activists, and intellectuals, promot-ing social debate, and deepenpromot-ing democracy.
Human development and capability. There is an intrinsic value in AHE and its contribution to making a good society based on humanistic ideals and to fostering capabilities for humans to flourish.
What should the contribution of Africa’s higher education be?
An entrepreneurial workforce. A renewed agenda for AHE must focus on skilled human resources, especially in science and
technology, for economic growth. Rural development, manufacturing industries, extractive industries, and export-oriented development require skilled workers to pro-duce employable graduates in areas the labor market needs them. Africa has the lowest pro-portion of global graduates: Though growing, tertiary enrollment stands at only 7 percent, so a considerable increase is required. Em-ployability is a shared concern in developing and advanced economies, but African coun-tries have the highest proportion of young people, coupled with high levels of youth unemployment, including among graduates.
(Mohamedbhai, 2013).
Which points to a fundamental dilemma:
Africa has a tiny share of the world’s grad-uates, but even as it strives to expand that share, its economies struggle to absorb even the few graduates available. Analysis of the
“absorption” problem focuses on whether AHE is doing enough to ensure employabili-ty. Perhaps the problem is a gap between how employability is understood by AHE and the kinds of employment actually or potentially there?
Suggested solutions lean heavily toward entrepreneurialism. They advocate less ex-pensive, non-university routes to TVET and the inculcation of soft skills that employers want. They encourage entrepreneurship edu-cation, and expect AHE to make itself more open to business and industry by introducing business influences into curricula, employing adjunct faculty from the business sector, and increasing industry placements and contact.
The private sector is considered the primary audience and beneficiary of AHE, while the government’s responsibility is to subsidize and incentivize that sector.
Good governance and developmental leadership. Some researchers are disap-pointed with AHE’s marginalized role in
promoting democracy, good governance, and developmental leadership. They see it as a missed opportunity to bring AHE’s prov-en influprov-ence to bear on wider governance, state-building, and transformative leadership.
In Ghana, for example, secondary and higher education contributed to leaders’ core values, leadership characteristics, and technical skills (box 8.1). These were directly relevant to several areas of developmental reform: dem-ocratic restoration, economic recovery, public sector reforms, and media liberalization. Gha-na’s improving governance was partly attributed to the cultivation of debate, critical thinking, meritocracy, tolerance, and positive leadership skills, all of which enabled edu-cated leaders to contribute, individually and through developmental coalitions. Skills, values, and networks were required to effect sustained change (Jones, Jones, & Ndaruhu-tse, 2014).
This example suggests that post-2015 ed-ucation policy need not be restricted to narrow conceptions of poverty reduction.
It could also address formative and strate-gic aspects of development leadership and
good governance. Though STEM is vital for economic development, the essential role of the humanities and social sciences in cre-ating transformative leadership is less well known. The most common subjects studied by Ghana’s developmental leaders were law, economics, politics, and journalism.
African citizenship. A broader AHE should educate people to form and interpret ideas that are key to sustainable development, such as social inclusion, equity, ethics, and political contestation; research and analysis conducted within AHE serves to inform and reform social policy and governance. Quality AHE should be conceptualized to offer rich opportunities to develop core values as well as technical skills, and to enable individuals and coalitions to explore political beliefs and activism within their educational experience.
Some progressive donors recognize that AHE does more than develop a skilled workforce for economic growth, seeing that a critical mass of researchers and institutes is needed to inform decision makers and the public about trends and issues. In a changing landscape, AHE should also contribute to a critical mass
Box 8.1 Beyond STEM in Ghana
According to the concept of capabilities-based professionalism, professional training for the public good in-volves developing eight professional capabilities: vision, affiliation, resilience, struggle, emotions, knowledge, imagination and skills, integrity, and confidence.
A study on Ghana looks back on a period characterized by inclusive access to quality education, during Nk-rumah’s post-colonial government. The key Ghanaian reform coalitions of the 1980s and 1990s had roots in campus networks formed in this earlier period. Most of the leaders in this study were positively affected by educational policies of widening meritocratic access to quality institutions, and this access made Ghanaian elites more meritocratic.
Academic status motivated individuals to join reform coalitions, while academic freedom provided some pro-tection for democratic causes. Educational experiences inculcated key values of public service and national unity, helping to form a consensus for democratization.
Source: Compiled from Jones, Jones, and Ndaruhutse (2014).
of independent- thinking citizens, necessary for knowledge societies to function as open and democratic policies.