http://new.siu.no/nor/content/download/1081/11847/file/report_siu_autumn_conference_2003

Norwegian Council for Higher Education/ Centre for International University Co-operation

Autumn Conference 2003 Policies and Models for International Co-operation in Higher Education Focusing on co-operation with institutions in South and East 6 - 7 October 2003 Solstrand Hotel, Os near Bergen, Norway

-------------------------------------------------------------SIU would like to thank all the participants at the 2003 Autumn Conference for making it a very interesting event with quality papers, comments and discussions. We hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did. Hopefully, we will be able to host a similar conference in a not so distant future.

Below you will find all the presentations and comments made during the two-day conference.

Best regards, from all of us at SIU

The role of Higher Education in Reducing Poverty and Promoting Prosperity Dr. Mamphela Ramphele Speech Delivered to the Conference, “Policies and Models for International Co-operation in Higher Education” Bergen, Norway October 6, 2003 I would like to thank the Norwegian Council for Higher Education for the opportunity to address this conference. I am especially pleased to be asked to talk about higher education as part of a strategy for poverty reduction. Misperceptions about higher education’s role in truly sustainable development have persisted for too long. No modern country has become prosperous without a strong higher education system. Yet this has not persuaded some from wondering whether poorer countries can “afford” to invest in higher education. But it is lack of investment in higher education—within a comprehensive approach to sound education at all levels—that continues to hamper our efforts to eliminate poverty. We should be clear and unequivocal in the reasons why poverty cannot be overcome without the benefits of higher education while we get on with the work of building stable, high quality higher education systems in all countries.

This paper will discuss key issues in the role of Higher Education in reducing poverty and promoting prosperity. The bulk of the paper is geared more to the unconverted both within and outside of the global donor community, the World Bank included.

A principal question is necessary at the outset: What is the theory of development that informs the choice of strategies for poverty reduction? Is the focus only on poverty reduction or also on the promotion of prosperity?

It is with a basis in this deepened focus, including promotion of prosperity, that this paper’s focus is on higher education’s value added to development with respect to:

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Capacity enhancement—at the individual, institutional, and societal levels;

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Science and technology—for the knowledge needed to tackle problems of health, food security, sustainable use of the environment, among others;

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The knowledge economy—to integrate knowledge production, application, and dissemination;

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Productivity—and its links to prosperity.

The paper will also look at the role of donors in untying aid, harmonizing and coordinating procedures, and bringing coherence to their policies and their overall approaches to aid. If these factors can be brought together appropriately, great strides can be made in the access to and quality of higher education in the developing world.

Unfortunately, my institution, the World Bank, bears some of the blame for perpetuating the unhelpful attitudes toward higher education’s role in development. For most of the decade of the 1990’s, the World Bank was seen as an enemy of higher education. It was the beginning of a great and appropriate zeal for the importance of basic education. Unfortunately, some of this zeal strayed into an almost ideological antipathy for higher education, buttressed by conceptually incomplete analyses and shortterm focused research. In the interim we have learned that we must respect the complexity and dynamism of development problems.

The World Bank after some five decades of development experience adopted its first strategic framework in 2001. The framework rests on two pillars: Promotion of a climate that promotes investment for equitable growth; and Promotion of investment in people that empowers them to participate in their own development.

If we fail to acknowledge the complexity of the problems we are dealing with, we may come away with answers that seem clear conceptually, but fail in practice. When they fail, they usually perpetuate or create further problems.

For example, rate-of-return analysis provides clear snapshot correlations between initial investments and subsequent streams of income. Leaving aside problems of data robustness, attribution, and the direction of causality, we get a picture of which investments generate the greatest returns, adjusted for the time it takes for the benefits to materialize. Basic development economic theory told us that whenever the rate-of-return

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of one project exceeds a competing alternative, the rational choice is to use all available capital for the higher return project. Economists had faith that the laws of supply and demand would diminish the returns to the marginal investment unit. Eventually, as all returns converged through this diminution, supply and demand would hit equilibrium at a point of “optimal allocation” of capital.

In the 1980’s a well known World Bank education researcher applied this methodology and found the highest returns were to basic education, the intermediate returns to secondary schooling, and the lowest returns to higher education. By his own admission, the high rates of return to basic education were due to “the interaction between the low cost of primary education (with respect to other levels) and the substantial productivity differential between primary school graduates and those who are illiterate.”1 Other levels of education required greater investment, and while their returns were greater in absolute terms, this particular research found them to be less as a discounted percentage of capital invested.

The methodology might lead one to conclude that widespread low cost investments are the main solution for education policy in the developing world. If a large gap exists between the productivity of an illiterate farmer and one with schooling, of course, the starting point is providing education to close this gap. But the goal must be more than only to exploit the high percentage returns on a small investment. We must think about the processes that underlie the benefits, and how they lead to prosperity or stagnation in the long-term.

Rates of return to education measure how education is valued for all available employment within an economy—such as subsistence farming and every other alternative wage-paying activity. But the measures are for one point in time only. 2 This input/output analysis tells us nothing about how new opportunities are created within an economy. If we know only the correlation but not the chain of causality, and if we look at societies at a single instant rather than through time, the calculations tell us that, from this starting point, the biggest pay off comes from reducing the gap between the illiterate and the functionally literate.

1

Psacharopoulos, George, “Returns to Education: A Further International Update and Implications,” The Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 20, No.4 (Autumn, 1985), 583-604. p.585

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One can’t help but wonder, however, if this mode of thinking does not lead to policies that perpetuate the painful stagnation we’ve seen in many poor countries, especially in areas like agricultural production in Sub Saharan Africa. More dynamic analyses have shed light on why educated farmers get better agricultural yields and better health outcomes. The effective use of agricultural technology, especially fertilizers, and some medical treatments, were shown to require the ability to process instructions from written texts and make appropriate inferences while drawing on relevant prior knowledge of agricultural chemistry and human biology. 3 Some of these farmers were benefiting from openness to behavioral change that comes from schooling. With pills and fertilizers, they could avoid the mistakes of illiterates, whose inability to decipher printed texts might damage their health, or at least waste their income. I ask myself one simple question: why stop here? Why be satisfied with the most basic mastery of technology when the real payoff comes later on?

Schooling puts individuals on the path toward the flexibility and adaptability in the face of increasingly complex problems. The high levels of consumption in wealthy countries come from having solved an array of problems through social organization that encourages differentiation of skills. Wealthy countries also have more adaptable people and institutions that extend the benefits of expertise beyond the individual who possesses it. Tertiary education keeps this machine running through continuous high-level training.

Higher education and poverty are linked because modern societies can become or remain materially wealthy only if they are managed by a large group of individuals with the right mix of sophisticated technical and organizational expertise. This expertise, and many of the behavioral attributes that go along with it, are most readily acquired and transmitted through modern tertiary education institutions.

Lessons over the last five decades of development assistance point to the critical role of Capacity Enhancement in promoting sustainable development. At the heart of Capacity Enhancement is the importance of intellectual capacity in analyzing national development challenges; formulating policy options to deal with these; mobilizing resources to implement plans within policy choices made; Monitoring and Evaluating 2

Ibid., p.590.

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performance; drawing lessons to improve performance including revising policy choices.

Capacity Enhancement has 3 elements; Individual, Institutional and Societal. On the individual level an enhancement of capacity comes from general education which again establishes critical thinking. Capacity enhancement is also promoted by professional training and experience for the individuals. On the institutional level capacity enhancement contributes to the strengthening of public, private and civil society institutions. And on the societal level, capacity enhancement promotes empowerment of the citizens, particularly those infused by a science culture. Empowered citizens consolidate democracy and ensure good governance. The three levels are internally reinforcing – the legacy of apartheid in South Africa is a good example of social engineering that denied the majority of citizens the high level of education and exposure to well-functioning institutions that are essential to running a modern democratic state.

Capacity enhancement is a long term program that has higher education at its core.

The World Bank’s fundamental strategy for poverty reduction recognizes the need for social transformation in its two basic principles: invest in people and create a climate for jobs, growth, and prosperity. It looks to the long-term to help countries go from poor and dependent to prosperous and self-sufficient. The challenge is huge, and the playing field is not level. Developing countries have to overcome not only internal constraints but also an external environment characterized by unfair trade rules, predatory immigration policies, and shrinking resources transfers.

But developing countries have at least one major asset in that they are home to the vast majority of the world’s young people. Low- and middle-income countries have ten times more inhabitants in the 0-14 year age group than do high-income countries. 4 If their talent and energy can be developed, channeled and harnessed within the complex systems mentioned earlier, the strategy will work. Well functioning equitable higher education is needed as a catalyst.

Consider how young peoples’ talent and potential is either developed or wasted in different societies. In low income countries, agricultural value added accounts for more than 24% of GDP and while agriculture employs over two-thirds of the labor force.

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Eisemon, Thomas Owen, Benefiting from Basic Education, School Quality, and Functional Literacy in Kenya, Pergamon Press, New York, 1998. p.113

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Value added in services is 45% of GDP. In high income countries, agricultural value added is 2% of GDP and about 3.5% of employment. Value added in services is 70% of GDP. These macro-level data reveal what happens when knowledge-rich technological solutions become deeply ingrained in one set of societies, but not in another. The effects are felt by poor people every day. In Africa, average agricultural production is about 1 ton per hectare. This yield is probably about the same as what farmers were historically able to produce before the technological advances of the last two centuries. In Asia, by contrast, yields have climbed steeply to about 3 tons per hectare. 5 Remember, these higher yields are produced by fewer people, freeing up labor for alternative use.

When the development agenda and the knowledge economy are discussed, their relevance to each other sometimes gets lost in breathless descriptions of infinite new possibilities. We hear about how the structure of employment is changing, sweetened by the presence of venture capitalists, fiber-optic technicians, software engineers, management consultants, stock market analysts, and web designers. But these new forms of employment are icing and not the cake. Their novelty and fascination make them appealing to the eye, but what nourishes is underneath. In poorer countries, structural changes must come to whole ranges of employment in ways that create healthy populations and unblock pathways to wealth.

We know a healthy population is required for prosperity. A knowledge rich society supports a large and differentiated array of health care professionals, from surgeons and specialists to several grades of nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants, phlebotomists, and physical therapists. Behind these stand many other layers of genetic counselors, engineers of medical devices, pharmaceutical sales and distribution staff, patient record management specialists, etc. All acquired their particular skills through some type of tertiary education.

An educated population is similarly important for a wealth society. Rich countries find themselves with teachers, special educational instructors, curriculum planners, educational technology specialists, varieties of school managers, educational

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The World Bank, World Development Indicators 2003, Washington, DC, 2003, Table 2.1, p.40 See Conway, Gordon, “Biotechnology and Hunger: Sense about Science� Remarks Delivered to the House of Lords, UK, May 8, 2003.

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psychologists, and all manner of assessment specialists, education researchers, and policy analysts. Most developing countries lack all but basic teachers and administrators.

Similar analyses could be done for almost any sector of the economy: financial services, advertising and marketing, transportation, apparel, entertainment, or journalism.

Most economists will admit that no one can describe exactly how countries go from more uniform and technologically poor to more differentiated and technology rich. Many different variables and influences are in play. But we know more than we did previously.

I would sum up our learning this way: the process is dynamic not linear and it involves feedback loops that traverse areas that we traditionally categorize as different “sectors.�

For example, clean water influences health and good health promotes readiness-to-learn, while education is associated with higher levels of hand washing and other sanitary practices. Roads and electricity facilitate schooling and industry, while higher income levels allow lower income parents to keep children in school longer.

We know also that flexibility and adaptability are needed in both the labor force and in social institutions. Higher education develops the cognitive abilities that allow individuals to adapt to a greater range of complex social situations. The resulting differentiation is the basis of a number of key institutions and practices that allow countries to maintain a high level of wealth and well-being.

Consider how this differentiation of expertise comes into play. If we forget for a moment about the vastness of the task of reaching the Millennium Development Goals, and think only of the problems of measuring progress towards them, we still face the need for a diverse array of indigenous skills. Demographers, bio-statisticians, house-hold survey design specialists, epidemiologists, environmental monitoring specialists, and many others. In the absence of good tertiary education (resting on sound basic and secondary education), even these categories of skills that allow policy makers to truly measure progress will not be available. If developing countries constantly rely on foreign expertise, they will find that they have bought into an agenda that may not serve their needs. The price is very high.

All of us who are working to help countries meet the Millennium Development Goals know how much faster progress would come if sufficient cadres of universitytrained indigenous expertise were available on the ground and in the field. While many

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dedicated individuals put their university training to use in their countries’ fight against poverty, too much of the developing world has yet to reach the critical threshold above which the benefits of knowledge transform a societies and consolidate their wealth.

A diverse array of highly-trained university graduates sustains prosperity in wealthy countries. Similar talent is needed in the developing world to reach the MDGs and move beyond them to prosperity.

I equate acknowledgement of the need for higher education in development as part of the recognition of the complexity of the problems of poverty. If poverty were not complex, we would have made more progress over the past five decades. The first step in solving complex problems is to resist the temptation of simplistic analyses.

Research on the benefits of higher education confirms its ability to influence people’s skills and behaviors in ways that facilitate the transformation to the more knowledge-rich, flexible, adaptable forms of social organization associated with prosperity. A recent comprehensive study from Great Britain6 found that university graduates: •

Had higher levels of earnings than both the population in general and their parents;

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Were employed in jobs that required multiples skills, especially computer skills;

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Were unemployed less frequently and for shorter periods of time, and had more ability to acquire new skills to adapt to changing employment conditions;

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Had better overall health, with lower levels of cigarette smoking, obesity, less depression and a greater overall sense of well-being;

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Held beliefs and attitudes more conducive to social cohesion and civic harmony, including a greater belief in racial equality, less unquestioning acceptance of authority, higher voting rates, more community volunteerism, and—among those with children--greater involvement in parent teacher associations;

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“Revisiting the Benefits of Higher Education,” Report by the Bedford Group for Lifecourse and Statistical Studies, Institute of Education, April 2003.

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As parents, read more to their children, provided their children with more books, and had children with higher mathematics and reading scores on standardized tests.

Again, the focus should not be on the individuals behavior, but rather on how the individual shapes and is shaped by increasingly complex social organizations as countries go from very low levels of tertiary education coverage (less than 10% of the age cohort) to the standards for wealth countries of 50% or more of the relevant age group.

Of course, lack of capacity is not the only hindrance to progress toward the Millennium Development Goals. We must also consider how donor behavior comes into play, both positively and negatively. To reach the Millennium Development Goals more resources are needed, from domestic but especially from external sources. We’ve seen many developed countries pledging additional resources but failing to deliver. We now know that economic growth alone will not be enough. Countries are more likely to achieve economic growth if they have resources to invest in the productivity of the citizens. We need to create a virtuous cycle of growth, trade, aid and sustainable debt levels.

Quality of Aid – in addition to quantity of aid – is critical to Capacity Enhancement. Tied aid is a major problem. Despite some progress on this front, we still find many instances of resources that come in forms that are more advantageous to the donor than to the recipient. Some analysts have estimated that only as little as half of the US$ 50 billion of aid annual is available as cash to be spent locally.

The political economy of Technical Assistance needs to be acknowledged. Tied Aid that promotes use of Technical Assistance from donor countries undermines the capacity building opportunities of developing countries: Expatriate experts cost more. They need to be coached to get to grips with the local situation. They are paid higher salaries on top of transportation costs. And they have a vested interest in remaining authorities in their fields, to perpetrate themselves and justify their roles. Much of the diverted aid goes to paying consultants from donor

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countries and their institutions. The cost of expatriate experts amount to USD 4 billion a year in Africa alone.

Expatriate experts displace indigenous experts and undermine Individual, Institutional, and Societal capacity. In other words, a missed opportunity of strengthening the indigenous capacity of individuals and institutions. Denial of opportunities to indigenous experts to engage with the development challenges of their own countries contributes to brain drain. Donors also tend not to provide infrastructure support to local institutions from which they recruit individual academics as consultants.

Institutions are thus unable to gear themselves to participate in the national development process. We know that country ownership is critical to achieve sustainable development.

Increasing the use of local university-trained and university-based consultants is a critical part of promoting country ownerships and improving both aid effectiveness and institutional capacity. Development needs to be driven by indigenous expertise within the public and private sector and civil society. We need to move from the viscous cycle of reliance on tied aid to a virtuous cycle of coherent country-led donor harmonized support.

Conclusion We now know that sustainable development needs recognition of interdependence within the global Knowledge economy. Coherence between Domestic and Global Agendas is necessary: Trade, Aid, Debt Relief and Military expenditure programs should cohere if we are to make progress in the fight against poverty and are to promote prosperity.

The currents asymmetries in global trade – with EU cows receiving USD 2.5 a day while human beings in developing countries on average live on USD 1.2 a day – and the 300 billion USD given in agricultural subsidies by the OECD countries vs. the 57 billion USD given in development aid – undermines the Capacity Enhancement of developing countries and their ability to become self-sustaining. Added to these subsidies is the lack of access to Science and Technology to enhance the productivity of farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa vs. the rest.

Better coordination and harmonization of aid procedures are needed, so that competing demands of donor agencies do not distract Governments from their core

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responsibilities. The commitments of the Rome Declaration on harmonization are meaningful and effective, and they are gaining momentum. Progress will come, because we know it is senseless to point the finger at developing country governments for lacking implementation capacity when they are faced with conflicting and abstruse procedures from an uncoordinated group of donors.

Beyond donor coordination, we also must be concerned about the coherence of donor policies, individually and collectively. We see, for instance, some OECD countries pledging to assist developing countries to improve their education systems on the one hand, then skimming off trained healthcare and other skilled workers through targeted migration programs. Such contradictory objectives undermine development effectiveness.

High quality higher education that is accessible, equitable and merit-based is key to tackling the complex development challenges we face. Our focus should be on the “hows” of implementation rather than the “whys” of investment choice. The implementation agenda includes questions about equity and access, quality assurance, institutional and systems governance, the new role of private institutions, new technologies and new modes of provision, research policy, intellectual property rights, regional integration and centers of excellence, among other issues. As we move forward in the scaling up of development efforts there should be no doubt about our commitment to the essential role of higher education in the fight against poverty.

Final version of October 7, 2003 3,621 words.

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Bjørn Skogmo Deputy Secretary General Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway

Check against delivery

Policies and Models for International Co-operation in Higher Education Solstrand Hotel, Os 6 – 7 October 2003

Strategies for Poverty Reduction. The Role of Higher Education Minister, distinguished participants, A major effort to fight world poverty is on its way. We now have a vision for improving the lives of the poorest - a vision expressed in the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs. World leaders agreed at the Millennium Summit in 2000 to do their utmost to reach these goals. A road map was laid out. In the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, and again at the World Conference on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg last year, we agreed not only on the goals, but also on how to reach them.

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We have in effect, a global compact between developing and developed countries. It is broad, but it is also fragile, victim to failures of governments to live up to these commitment, to fluctuations in the world economy and to other distractions.

The MDGs have placed the interest of the poor and underprivileged at the top of the international agenda. Heads of state, including the G8 leaders at their annual summits, agree that poverty is the greatest scourge of our time.

They promise to combat poverty by co-operation, by financial assistance, by implementing policies that are coherent, consistent - and caring. What we all expect now is follow-up and action. And we have agreed, - for the first time – to monitor progress.

The goals are ambitious. We have committed ourselves to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. We are committed to reducing child mortality by 2/3 and to achieve universal primary education. We are committed to promoting gender equality and empower women, to ensure environmental sustainability, to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria.

In the 8th MDG - on a Global Partnership for Development - the rich part of the world has committed itself to do what is necessary to eradicate poverty.

We have committed ourselves to change policies, to develop a more open trade and investment system. We have committed ourselves to deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt problems, and to provide access to affordable essential drugs. We have committed ourselves to increase development assistance.

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From the Norwegian side, we will do our part - in all these areas. We plan to increase the level of ODA from the current 0.93 percent to one percent of gross national income by 2005. In the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations this summer, we stated that we are willing to be examined by our partners in the efforts to achieve MDG 8, to be monitored and examined on the coherence of our development policies, in short, - to be held as accountable as donors as we increasingly hold our partners in the South responsible for their policies, practices and development outcomes.

The Government last year launched an ”Action Plan for Combating Poverty in the South towards 2015”. The Action Plan provides an overall strategy for Norway’s efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. It stresses the need for more coherence in policies and practices. The Action Plan also underlines that education is a major weapon in the fight against poverty.

The Action Plan on Poverty was followed up this year by a new education strategy, launched in Tanzania in January by our Minister for International Development and our Minister for Education. In this strategy, education was designated as "Job number 1". We will intensify our efforts to reach the goal of "education for all" by the year 2015 as a fundamental human right.

We plan to increase the share of our ODA earmarked for education to 15% by 2005, from roughly 9% last year. This may translate to up to an extra 1 billion Norwegian kroner (or nearly 140 million US dollars at the current exchange rate) for education in development over the period 2003-2005. We wish in particular to support education that focuses on the poor and on women - as a right for all.

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The fact that the new education strategy was launched in Tanzania, was not accidental. Tanzania is a major partner country for Norwegian development cooperation. It is a country where our bilateral aid programme has included substantial support to the education sector. During the 1960s and 1970s, Tanzania achieved significant results with respect to literacy and primary education enrolment. However, after a period of considerable optimism, trends were reversed. The literacy rate declined and poverty rates increased.

What went wrong? The causes are not fully understood. But we do know that one of the key problems was a lack of a coherent and holistic approach to education – from the Tanzanian government and from the donors. A new effort is now under way in Tanzania, through a national poverty reduction strategy, a major Primary Education Development programme. which is already showing very promising results in terms of enrolment. Tanzania is now one of the countries estimated to have a good chance of reaching MDG 4 to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015.

Norway is committed to making significant increases in our support to primary education in the poorest developing countries. These efforts will be closely coordinated with the policies of the recipient countries and harmonized with the efforts of other donors, bilateral and multilateral.

Norway is already actively involved in primary education for girls. We intend to further strengthen this involvement. Educating women achieves results in the areas of birth control, health, HIV/AIDS, income generation

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and many other areas. We achieve several development goals simultaneously.

This will include efforts to raise awareness among public authorities, local communities and parents regarding the rights of girls to education and the value of providing them with education. We will concentrate more on training female teachers in order to improve the school environment and the girls with valuable role models. Many girls – and boys – drop out of school before completing their primary education. To prevent this, teaching methods and textbooks must become more relevant and closely associated with their everyday lives.

A considerable part of Norway’s increase in assistance to education will be provided through multilateral channels. Multilateral organisations play a major role in the efforts for better education, through funding, research, coordination and operational advice and expertise. Organisations such as UNICEF, the World Bank, UNESCO and the regional development banks are highly relevant partners in education.

Investments in education are needed at all levels, from the primary level to institutions of higher education and research. Focusing on higher education is important for building capacity to make government administration more effective, improve the delivery of social services to the public and enhance economic development.

Education, at all levels, including higher education, is also necessary for promoting democracy and human rights. Education is a basic prerequisite for

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individuals in their efforts to realise their potentials and ambitions, and to participate fully in social, economic and political processes.

Every year, more than a million children lose their teachers as a result of HIV/AIDS. This pandemic is so extensive and has such dramatic consequences that it must be incorporated in many areas of Norwegian development assistance. We must prevent the disease from undermining the education system as a whole. The fight against HIV/AIDS starts in the primary school with information about how the pandemic spreads and how the schools can contribute to preventive measures. This is an effort which requires national leadership, international support and more comprehensive strategies, including more affordable medicine and programmes for treatment and care.

During the last 20 years, education, the basic infrastructure in many poor countries, has crumbled. Literacy rates have dropped, in some countries significantly. The quality of higher education has been seriously eroded in many developing countries, in particular in Africa. School fees have been introduced, excluding many poor people and girls from education. Getting young people to complete their education is a major challenge.

This trend must be reversed. Not only for the sake of our overall development goals, for the reduction of poverty. But also, and not least, because every individual has the right to education. It is enshrined in several human rights conventions. But the right to education does not only imply access to education. Without the right to complete one’s education, it is meaningless.

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The focus on primary education should not distract us from also making increased efforts in higher education and vocational training. Norway has provided support for higher education in developing countries throughout the major part of our 50-year history of development cooperation to enhance knowledge and competence in countries of the South.

Norways’ support to higher education is concentrated in - but not limited to our partners in Eastern and Southern Africa. Substantial funding, amounting to 20-25 million NOK annually in each of the programmes, is provided to higher education in Uganda (Makerere University), in Tanzania (Dar, Sokoine and Mzumba) and Ethiopia (primarily Addis Ababa University).

Each year, more than 50 millions NOK is spent to bring over 100 candidates from developing countries to study for master degrees in Norway, and increasingly - at institutes of higher education in other countries in the South. We support - for example - graduate students from developing countries studying at Third World Institutions like the Earth University in Costa Rica and the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok.

Let me add that we take the problem referred to by the previous speaker, professor Mamphela Ramphele, about lack of alignment with country priorities and lack of harmonization among donors, very seriously. In fact, harmonization of priorities and practices, i.a. through a clearer division of labour - is now one of the most important - and exciting - avenues to enhance the quality and effectiveness of aid and thereby to advance the development agenda. This is not always an easy process, donors tend to

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bring with them their own traditions, priorities and interests. But very clearly, we need to bring more coherence and consistence to the overall effort.

We recognise that higher education systems in many developing countries are in critical conditions. Budgets have been cut and many of the bestqualified academics disappear abroad. The poorest developing countries do not have the capacity for organising research on a sustainable basis. National competence is inadequate to meet national needs in the education sector, including the training of teachers.

The weak institutional capacity in higher education in poor developing countries also results in inadequate competence to make use of research generated knowledge which is readily available internationally for those who has the know-how to access it and to use such knowledge in their national development processes.

In recognition of these challenges, we formulated back in 1999 a �Strategy for strengthening research and higher education in the context of Norway’s relations with developing countries. This strategy remains valid as complimentary to the Education Strategy of 2003, which is focused more on primary and secondary education.

Norway will continue to support institutions of higher education and research in priority sectors in our partner countries for development cooperation. This is of particular importance in countries where we have a

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strong engagement in the education sector as such, like Tanzania. We will also support research on the education sector in these countries.

Support for higher education is often a component in our sector programmes and projects in partner countries - far beyond the education sector. Longterm assistance in our country programmes in sectors such as health, energy, agriculture, fisheries and public management have important components of competence-building and the strengthening of institutional capacity. We support sectoral training institutions and relevant training programmes at university level in a number of countries. The oil sector in Angola is one such example.

The Action Plan for combating poverty makes the point that broad-based, relevant knowledge is essential to combat poverty more effectively.

Research and development work should focus on issues that clarify how Norway, as a small country, can make a contribution. It will be important to acquire sufficient knowledge of the impact of various policy areas on poverty and on poverty reduction.

It is a particular challenge to acquire sufficient knowledge of the effects of other areas of policy on living conditions in poor countries. This is a challenge to public administration, the private sector, civil society and the academic community. The research community should contribute to the development of more effective monitoring tools in relation to indicators that are used by international and multilateral organisations to measure poverty and progress made in combating it.

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The strengthening of higher education and the building of independent national research capacity is critical to any developing country. Investments in higher education and research also have a positive impact on economic development and growth. Focusing on higher education is also important for building capacity in the public administration. More competent civil servants will increase the effectiveness of public administration and improve public services of relevance to the poor.

We need to know more about the impact of different types of interventions.

New research should contribute to elaborate on this aspect of efforts to reduce poverty. These are issues that should be explored through collaborative research efforts between scholars in the South and in the North. The strengthening of higher education in developing countries can also make contributions to the fight against poverty through the training of researchers capable to analysing the challenges we are up against.

There is a need to bridge the gap between policy makers and the research community, both in the North and in the South, in terms of communication about available research findings with respect to poverty reduction in developing countries and its relevance for actions taken across different fields of policy.

The Norwegian Action Plan to Combat Poverty underscores a commitment to “contribute to the acquisition of new knowledge of the factors that cause and prolong poverty�. It calls for more research, in Norway as well as in our partner countries in the South, that helps us understand and interpret

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development trends reflecting the MDGs: income poverty, access to education, gender equality, and better health.

South-South cooperation is important – also in the context of higher education and research. We are making efforts to strengthen regional, or sub-regional, research networks in the South, mostly in Africa as part of our support for the financing of higher education and research in the South. This is an area where we will be doing more in the future.

At the same time, North-South cooperation will continue to be of critical importance when competence building in higher education and research in developing countries is concerned. This is an area where we have a solid foundation to build upon in Norway. Norwegian universities and university colleges have over a considerable period of time been engaged in collaborative teaching and research with institutions in the South through the NUFU programme. Arrangements are also being expanded to engage the institute sector in Norway in North-South cooperation in the field of higher education and research.

North-South research collaboration must be based on genuine partnership and equality. The partnership agreement on research cooperation between South Africa and Norway currently under implementation is an encouraging illustration of how this can be achieved Our experience has been that North-South cooperation in higher education and research has made valuable contributions to the strengthening of capacity and competence among the Southern partners. But also the

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Norwegian institutions have benefited, which they quite rightly should.

NUFU is not fully funded by resources from the development cooperation budget, nor should this be the case. The Norwegian institutions make significant contribution through their own resources.

Let me conclude by reiterating that higher education has a significant role to play in the fight against poverty in the South and that institutions of higher education and research in the North can make an important contribution by supporting the effort of our partners in the South through partnerships in higher education and research.

Norwegian Centre for International University Cooperation Bergen, October 6, 2003

Strategies for Poverty Reduction – the Role of higher education institutions Comments by Eva Egron-Polak Secretary General, International Association of Universities (IAU)

Minister Asmal, Dr. Ramphele, Deputy Secretary General Skogmo, colleagues.

It is an honour as well as a real pleasure to have the opportunity to participate at this annual meeting of the SIU. I would like to thank the Centre of International University Cooperation for inviting me.

They gave me a difficult job – commenting on a paper by Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, Managing Director of the World Bank. It is a daunting task, made even more difficult by only receiving her paper late last evening because of some mix up. So, please forgive me if only part of my comments will be a response to her presentation and part will be just plain comments on the topic of the role of universities in poverty reduction.

First, let me say that I think we live in an era of incredible complexity and fast-paced policy making for higher education at every level – institutional, national, regional and international. Higher education has become vested with huge responsibilities and expectations. Furthermore it has come to be seen as a very lucrative industry. The discovery of the Knowledge Economy or the Knowledge Society (not the same but both very a la mode), have made higher education the key to wealth, the path to development, the solution for every ill. Yet, the directions various policies take or suggest we take to ensure success in the Knowledge Society, are often very different and at times quite contradictory. Most important of all, only in few countries has this rhetoric about the centrality of education been accompanied with adequate public funding and, if funding has been increased, it has been done so only after several years of almost chronic underfunding.

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So in a way, higher education has been made vulnerable precisely at a time when its importance is recognized by all.

This vulnerability is, in very large measure, the result of several years of World Bank policy. And I would argue that the impact of these policies, in a nutshell, the steering of support away from higher education to focus almost exclusively on basic or primary education, was felt well beyond the developing world. The WB has a tremendous steering policy effect, which actually goes well beyond and is completely out of proportion with actual lending or levels of funds it spends. This steering effect is important to note and consider. While it is still unclear how the recent policies, such as those articulated in the 2002 report, Constructing Knowledge Societies, or the earlier UNESCO/WB Task Force report, Peril and Promise, will translate into lending practice, even if they do not significantly increase the level of funding to higher education, we need to seize the opportunity to use the policy’s spotlight on higher education to increase other donors’ attention and our own.

So the mea culpa inherent in recent policy papers, such as Constructing Knowledge Societies and Dr. Ramphele’s and other Bank leaders’ recognition of the Bank’s errors is a positive sign. This new policy appears to fully accept and espouse what most university people have been pointing out loud and clear for years, namely that higher education plays as a major and indispensable role in social, economic, cultural and political development and thus poverty reduction , not least because it is a cornerstone of a strong educational system overall.

But the realization by the WB and by other donors that policies pursued so far have not brought the desired effects in terms of poverty reduction are not surprising , given the situation in so much of the world: •

56% of the world’s population still lives in poverty with 1.2 billion with less than 1$ per day and another 2.8 billion with less than 2$.

•

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Poverty is increasing in Africa and in Latin America.

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•

There are 18 mainline telephones for every 1000 people in Africa as compared to more than 600 per 1000 in industrialized nations.

•

While 90% of cases of HIV?AIDS are found in developing nations, 10% of the funds to combat the illness are spent there.

•

In some parts of Africa, due the pandemic, teachers are dying faster than they can be trained.

And, to top off this statistical nightmare, ODA has dropped by 29% over the past 10 years accept in a few countries such as Norway, whose commitment to not only reach but actually surpass promised levels of funding, is commendable.

To paraphrase Stieglitz, when nine out of ten patients being treated by the same doctor die, it is clear the doctor is not sure about what he is doing. That is the only conclusion one can come to when we review these few symptoms.

Yet, despite this reality, and even if these recent, more positive policy statements of the WB, could give us cause for optimism about tertiary education, they continue to have a strong prescriptive tone of what must be done and a sense of continued arrogance about the Bank’s knowledge about what is best for all. It is still the Bank coming with solutions that fit within its theory or model of development and focus first and foremost on growth, expansion and economic catch up. Very little is said about wealth redistribution, about learning from the specificities of context and about working with all local stakeholders in more than just a cosmetic manner or to avoid conflict, but really to work with them in order to find the paths towards better living standards that are appropriate.

So, we can agree with the Bank (or the Bank finally agrees with us), that empowering people and investing in people, is key. Universities in a context of teaching and research create the indispensable intellectual capacity every nation needs. They educate people who create jobs, who become policy makers, educate others, who offer health services, who can advocate for artist’s rights and make films, create a music industry, become

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lawyers and trade negotiators, who invent new techniques in agriculture or pisciculture and study how sports and physical fitness can create a sense of pride and mobilize people.

In all of these ways, higher education institutions contribute to socio-economic development at the local and global level.

Since we also agree that poverty itself is a more complex, multidimensional concept that needs to be tackled from several fronts, all of these ways of investing in people are equally important and the strictly utilitarian approach to higher education should be put to rest; there are many ways to empower the poor.

But it seems to me that one of the most important roles that higher education institutions need to play both in developed and developing countries, remains that of the critics of the established truths, the questioners of the rules of the game, those who bring to light the contradictions, debate the ethical and moral issues facing societies.

This role, they must play both in the North and in the South because in an era of globalization, poverty reduction and sustainable development will not happen without profound changes taking place as much among the ‘haves’ as among the ‘have nots’.

The recent WTO meetings in Cancun is a case in point. But why is it, that during the lead up to the meetings in Cancun, it was OXFAM reports and not universities that were in the newspapers decrying the inequities of the global trading system and the impact such inequities have on poverty and development? Why was it OXFAM that pointed out that for each dollar in aid, two dollars are lost due to unequal trade rules, totaling 100 billion dollars per year, or twice as much as what is spent on aid?

Institutions of higher education can only fully play their role as critics and doubters if they are independent, meaning that they have academic freedom and institutional autonomy and are adequately resourced in order to fulfill their responsibilities to society.

These conditions – academic freedom, autonomy, and adequate resources are today

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challenged everywhere and not least of all by the trends that will be discussed here later when we turn to the debate about GATS and education.

Calling, as the WB still does, for a far more financially diversified system of higher education with more room made for private, higher education institutions, including those that are for-profit, may only partially and only in the short term, meet the needs of the developing nations. Worse, opening up one’s market to for profit private higher education from abroad, may undermine even more the crucial role higher education must play in society. With an eye on the profit margin, private higher education will not necessarily invest in those areas that are most required to address societal needs such as health and medical sciences and research areas requiring costly equipment. They may also not offer programs in humanities, the arts and social sciences, so needed to strengthen the capacity of developing nations to assume a strong voice on their own behalf in global negotiations. At worse, their presence places new and different demands on the public institutions that may or may not be met by the State, which can use the presence of these new providers in order decrease its own commitment to higher education. Private providers, particularly foreign institutions can also contribute to an internal braindrain of faculty and worsen the external brain drain by providing training more appropriate elsewhere.

If we are ready to view higher education as a sector that is traded internationally on the open and unregulated market, why do we think that this sector will fare any better than trade in coffee or cotton, for example? Why in this service sector, should the inequities of trade relations be absent? The asymmetry of power in trade negotiations is the same as for other sectors, yet given the above noted importance of higher education, the risk seems even greater.

There is no doubt in my mind about the value and absolute need for international cooperation in higher education. But all of you participate in such cooperation already.

Your cooperative linkages and student exchange or mobility programs are based on dialogue, not negotiations, on transparency not bargaining behind closed doors, on

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responsive partnerships where developing country institutions are driving the collaboration and the goal includes mutual learning and shared benefits. Such collaboration has not needed an open trading system or free access to markets in order to flourish. But as globalization of higher education expands, it has, and increasingly will require, a policy framework to ensure it is conducted ethically. A policy framework at the national and international level as well, is needed to regulate such international activities.

So my last point is that just as donors in the North expect developing nations to establish comprehensive poverty reduction strategies and comprehensive development plans, the donor countries too must develop more coherence in our policy vis a vis international cooperation in higher education. It is not certain that internationalization policies that on the one hand focus on development projects to build or enhance capacity and strengthen our partner institutions are coherent with our internationalization policies that focus on recruitment of student or exports of our programs overseas.

It is increasingly important, in this era of complexity and interconnectedness of foreign and domestic policies, to ensure that in regards to higher education cooperation, ministries of development cooperation, of international trade and of education and research talk to each other as they appear to do, to some extent, in Norway. In addition, it is essential that within the higher education institutions, those who are concerned with internationalization view it in a comprehensive fashion as well. The fact that the recent Berlin Declaration of Ministers of Education in Europe placed highest priority on making European higher education more attractive, may just more starkly presage a ‘global competition or ‘trading war’ for the best brains in the world, a competition that is by no means new. These bright brains are not only found in other industrialized countries; they are also found in many developing countries which can ill afford the loss of their future generation of leaders.

I look forward to seeing how this morning’s discussion will be taken up later when we examine education as a common good.

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While I regret that I was not able to tell you a little about the IAU, and do not wish to do so now, I would like at least to alert you to our General Conference next July in Sao Paulo, Brazil (25-29, 2004), on the theme of Diversity in Higher Education and the Role of Universities in Promoting Development and Dialogue. I hope to see many of you participate in that meeting.

Thank you

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Else Øyen, professor Centre for International Poverty Research University of Bergen, Norway else.oyen@sif.uib.no www.crop.org

SIU konferanse Solstrand 6.-7. October 2003

Strategies for poverty reduction Higher education has a value of its own. When linked to the issue of poverty reduction it is necessary to ask another set of questions, including the crucial one whether higher education in general is the best tool for poverty reduction.

One set of questions concerns the relationship between primary education and higher education. Given limited resources to education it will often be necessary to prioritise between primary education and higher education. As a poverty reducing strategy there is little doubt that more poor children can be enrolled in primary education than in higher education, partly because the threshold for enrolment is lower, partly because primary schools can be decentralised, and partly because primary education is less costly and as such can accommodate more poor children. Limited access to primary education will in turn create limited access to higher education. It can of course be argued that education of teachers depends on higher education, but here we are talking about higher education in general.

Another set of issues concerns the shaping of the future of a society through education.

Here primary education and higher education have different roles to play. Higher education, in spite of all the positive things we can say about it, will, if given priority on behalf of primary education, contributes to more inequality in a society that is already unequal. Only the elite and the upper middle class will be able to afford to send their children into higher education, even if such education is in principle free. And as we know, higher education is an instrument to more influence and power over the use of public resources and institution building.

Universal primary education on the other hand is more likely to contribute to equality in the sense that all children are given a better base for further advancement. Let me refer here to a paper by an Indian professor in economics, André Beteille, who for twenty years has written on education, inequality and universality. Poverty can not be beaten through higher education only. Mr. Skogmo talks about ”higher education is important for building capacity to make government more effective, improve the delivery of social services to the public and enhance economic development” (p.3). Yes, that is likely true.

But what does it do to poor uneducated people who are rightly sceptical to government officials, legal institutions and public servants, and even directly afraid of their power to harm poor citizens. This scepticism and fear of poor people is heavily documented by the World Bank studies, and seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. The crucial question is: how can higher education which is often tailored to western ideas of higher education, be designed and constructed in such a way that it overcomes the scepticism and fear of poor people and contributes directly to poverty reduction?

The Norwegian Action Plan is good, and may I add without being too chauvinistic, it is among the best I have seen so far. It stresses ”a vision for improving the lives of the poorest”. Also in education. But the Plan does not address the issues raised above. On the contrary, it muddles the arguments through promoting all kinds of education without sorting out different kinds of analyses, conditions and consequences for different kinds of educational systems.

Many academic institutions in the South offering higher education are in sad state, as stressed in both mr. Skogmo’s and dr. Ramphele’s presentations. Professors and teachers work within an inadequate infrastructure, to say it politely, and their salaries are such that they have to take other jobs besides their job at the teaching institution.

Research is a luxury that comes only to the few, and updating of knowledge is a constant challenge to be overcome. In the midst of all this, multi-national and national donors as well as NGOs add to the misery by pulling experts out of their academic environment and turn them into relatively well-paid consultants. For most academics in the South this is a tempting opportunity. Donors and NGOs are in constant need of qualified endogenous expertise. Actually, this is part of their ideology about partnership and involving local people. So they pay well – and pull the good academics out of the universities. That is also poverty production, although of a different kind. Over time the expertise of those academics deteriorate. One consultation report on poverty after the other builds on previous reports, no time is available for the acquirement of new knowledge, and the quality of the knowledge brought back to the donors diminishes rapidly. As a result the teaching institutions and the higher education suffer. And even worse, interventions for poor people based on such reports increase the suffering of poor people. One can well identify another poverty producing process in the midst of benevolence.

These are the comments I made before coming to this conference. Let me add some ad hoc comments based on the two previous speakers’ presentations.

Dr. Ramphele together with professor Francis Wilson of the University of Cape Town made an early and inventive study of the living conditions of poor people in South Africa (the Carnegie study) when poverty among poor people was not even considered in the statistics on poverty in South Africa. In her presentation here she has mainly concentrated on poor countries and made the implicit assumption that helping poor countries will help reduce poverty. I am arguing elsewhere that aid to poor countries does not necessarily result in a reduction of poverty among poor people and that the two concepts need to be kept analytically apart. This analysis is relevant also for education on different levels. The unfortunate mixture of concepts is seen in much of the World Bank literature on poverty. My challenge to dr. Ramphele is to bring this issue back to the World Bank and invite the Bank to consider such conceptual clarifications and their policy implications.

Mr. Skogmo stressed the need for streamlining development aid. He gave as examples the ongoing co-operation between the OECD countries and the World Bank and the need to unite donor forces to combat poverty and avoid overlapping of interventions. On the one hand it can be argued that when the richest countries join forces it will provide an extremely powerful coalition in the fight against poverty, if they have the right solution. On the other hand, it is necessary to look also at a scenario where their unified solution may not be right or adequate. Dominant theories of development are being

2

questioned, and have been so for quite a while now. The tendency to prefer systems of education developed in the North and apply them to the South is likewise being questioned. Both modes of aid is still prevail.

We shall be wise if we follow the advice of dr. Ramphele and listen to experts in the teaching institutions in the South, provided they do not forget the poorest part of the population in their advice to the mighty donors of the North.

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Formulating Higher Education Policies in Africa 1 - the Pressure from External Forces and the Neoliberal Agenda Birgit Brock-Utne 2 Institute for Educational Research, University of Oslo, Norway

Introduction When lost, it is better to return to a familiar point before rushing on.

(African proverb) A university’s contribution to development turns on the quality of the knowledge it generates and disseminates.

(Sawyerr, 2002: 34) When the historian Ki-Zerbo from Burkina Faso discussed contemporary education in Africa in 1990, he started by quoting the above African proverb. He was concerned about the decline in quality, knowledge generated, and independent research at the African universities at that time. Akilagpa Sawyerr (2002), the Secretary General of the Association of African Universities and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, voiced a similar concern in a more recent publication. He noted that the underfunding of African universities, along

1

The analysis and discussion that follow will be limited to sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa has since the dismantling of the apartheid regime become a regional presence with a massive transformation agenda of its own. The historically white universities here have traditionally modelled themselves after universities in Europe

2 with market-driven globalisation and the neo-liberal agenda of the last 15-20 years, have seriously affected the independent and critical research capabilities of African universities.

The principal contribution of a university to society, according to Sawyerr, can be measured by the quality of the knowledge a university generates and imparts, the habits of critical thought it institutionalises and inculcates in its graduates, and the values of openness and democratic governance it promotes and demonstrates (Sawyerr, 2002). The quality of performance of African universities can, according to Sawyerr, be assessed through the use of indirect indicators such as: • the calibre and commitment of the teaching and research staff; • the range and quality of the curriculum and pedagogy; and • the quality and extent of educational facilities, including the means of accessing traditional as well as world-wide knowledge.

Sawyerr, 2002 In his book "Educate or Perish" Ki-Zerbo (1990) presented an urgent call to educators in Africa to set immediately to the task of designing an education that is of Africa and for Africa. He acknowledged the importance of Africa’s returning to her roots, to restore the culture and true independence of Africa. He tells how the break-up of the African educational system was completed by colonial domination. The colonialists replaced the African educational system with an absolutely different system, one designed to serve the overall aim of the subjugation of the continent and its people to European needs. For African societies, education lost its functional role. By this, Ki-Zerbo does not mean that Africa should return to the system of merely informal education that was pervasive prior to colonisation. Instead, he

3 In this article I shall look at the formulation of higher education policies in Africa, and, more specifically, who formulates them. It is not possible to discuss higher education policies in Africa without discussing the important role of the donors and international agencies, the first and foremost being the World Bank. The World Bank’s influence—setting conditionalities and promoting the neo-liberal agenda—will be discussed below. I will also examine the effects of the renewed emphasis on basic education for the higher education sector in Africa. Two rather recent documents from the World Bank show that the Bank has been rethinking its stance on higher education in African and is now actually now giving some emphasis to the higher education sector across the continent (World Bank,2000; World Bank,2002). It does not, however, acknowledge or apologize for the mistakes made during the years since it shifted its own resources from higher to primary education and encouraged bilateral donors and African governments to do the same.

Other matters worthy of consideration are whether the terms of the Banks recent engagement (the knowledge competitiveness argument) make sense for Africa and if and how universities in Africa can cope with the current crises. I will devote space both to the neoliberal agenda and the link phenomenon, as well.

Towards the end of the article I shall also look into the language policies in higher education in Africa as well as the curriculum development policies. I shall explore the link between the ordinary people of Africa and academia, examining the extent to which national

4

Educational Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa In the beginning of 1988, I was asked by the Norwegian Development Agency (NORAD) to make a critical review of Educational Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa (EPSSA) (1988), a World Bank publication. At that time I was a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. I had, however, started in my position just six months earlier and felt that I did not know African education well enough to be able to make this analysis on my own.

Instead, I decided should have to rely heavily on African expertise, first and foremost that of my colleagues. I also determined it would also be necessary to elicit the views of educators in other African countries on this document. So, on Thursday, 21 January 1988, I paid a visit to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Malawi in Zomba.

On arriving at the University of Malawi, I was rather startled to discover learn that the Vice Chancellor was a white British man. He noticed my surprise and told me that Life President Kamuzo Banda had himself decided that the Vice Chancellors of the University of Malawi should be white British men. In Banda’s opinion, these were the only leading educationalists he could trust to serve in these important positions. Still, this particular Vice Chancellor identified himself strongly with the University of Malawi and, especially, with the students and the staff.

On this particular day, he was disturbed because he had just been told that the World Bank had insisted that all book allowances to students be cut, as well as all funding for

5 “How can we formulate policies for the higher education sector here in Africa when conditionalities are forced on our institutions of higher learning for loans we have not even asked for?” he asked. He was very upset and felt so sorry for the students. Strikes had, at that time, been forbidden by Lifetime President Banda, but the Vice Chancellor knew that such bad news must result in some kind unrest frustration and indignation among the students, since he knew that many of them could neither afford to buy books nor to go home for vacations. When it came to the policy document of the World Bank, he was extremely sceptical as he saw in it an attempt to reduce the role of higher education in Africa and give priority to primary education. “Are we not going back to colonial times?” he asked.

Together with some of my colleagues at the University of Dar es Salaam, I arranged a student-staff seminar on 28 January 1988, to discuss the EPSSA World Bank report. Several of them had received the report in its full text, and I had seen to it that everyone had a summary of the report, as well. The discussion was very lively. Most of my colleagues voiced strong criticism of the report. They were annoyed at the audacity of the World Bank to write education policies fo r for Sub-Saharan Africa, asking me if the World Bank would write education policies for for Norway. Certainly not. The question was well-placed.

They were annoyed at the suggestions from the World Bank that they cut back on higher education, on educational theory within teacher training and paying teachers even less. when teacher training is vital to all levels of education, and teachers were already severely

6 enrolments in higher education. They saw, however, that this suggestion is was advanced repeatedly in the EPSSA paper 3 .

The EPSSA paper also suggests that students pay for their upkeep at the university.

Furthermore, the paper also suggesteds cut-backs in university funding for fields like the arts and humanities, threatening exactly those fields which, according to my colleagues the faculty, must be strengthened if an aim of higher education is to restore the African heritage. I listened well to their critiques and built my report to NORAD entirely on what my colleagues had said. A group of them read my report critically before it was sent. I remember one of them saying: “It is a wonderful analysis and critique of that World Bank report, Birgit. You have actually captured everything we said but none of us would have dared to have written that report.” The others nodded. They were dependent on donor consultancies to supplement their meagre salaries; the World Bank paid the best. I, on the other hand, had my salary from home and was not dependent on consultancies. I could, therefore, be much more explicit and critical than my colleagues.

In my book Whose Education for All? (Brock-Utne, 2000a), I ask whether there is a future for higher education in Africa after the Jomtien conference in 1990 and the formulation of the “Education for All” strategy. It has been almost thirty years since the World Bank began the process of emphasizing the importance of primary and basic (including, at first, non-formal) education in its 1974 Education Sector Working Paper. The Bank urged that the

7 twenty years to raise raising dramatically the proportion of lending for primary education and reducing the proportion to higher education, as planned, to approximately 30% (King, 1995).

The subsequent Education Sector Policy Paper (World Bank, 1980) was remarkable in that there was almost no more than a page or two of discussion on higher education in some 100 pages of text.

The thinking of the World Bank was instrumental in shaping the 1990 Jomtien conference "Education for All." At the conference, the countries in the South feared that the donor emphasis on basic education would mean a further starvation of higher education. At the Jomtien conference, a whole series of countries, therefore, were lobbying for more explicit safeguards for higher education, research, and access to high technology. The thrust of this concern was from Latin America, with other signatories coming from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. NORRAG News (1990: 6) claims that the pressure from the developing countries led to the article quoted below, Article 8, point 2 in the World Declaration on Education for All: Societies should also insure a strong intellectual and scientific environment for basic education. This implies improving higher education and developing scientific research. Close contact with contemporary technological and scientific knowledge should be possible at every level of education.

(WCEFA, 1990:8) In an evaluation of the outcomes of the EFA conference from an African perspective, AimĂŠ Damiba, the program specialist in education and planning in UNESCO's regional office

8 education and to tell developing countries to do the same. In hindsight we can see that their interpretation, unfortunately, was correct. 4 It is worth mentioning that at a meeting with African vice-chancellors in Harare in 1986, the World Bank argued that higher education in Africa was a luxury. Most African countries were, according to the World Bank, better off closing universities at home and training graduates overseas. Recognizing that its call for a closure of universities was politically untenable, the Bank subsequently modified its agenda, calling for universities in Africa to be trimmed and restructured to produce only those skills which the "market" demands. Such was its agenda for university restructuring in Nigeria in the late 1980s, for instance (Mamdani, 1993). Isahaku Sadique (1995), through his analysis of the World Bank's involvement in the university sector in Nigeria, concludes that the World Bank still sees university education for Africans as a luxury. He also shows how the Bank forced the National University Commission (NUC) of Nigeria "to reallocate resources in order to shift emphasis from arts and humanities to science, engineering, and accountancy" (Sadique, 1995: 130). He further reports that the World Bank insisted on choosing the contractors who were to supply the needed materials (books, journals, laboratory consumables) and that all of these contractors were foreign companies.

When funds to build up higher education in Africa are cut back, the dependency of Africa on studies overseas increases. African institutions of higher learning are again staffed

9 or, at least, non-African concepts, ideas, outlooks, and research methodologies. The braindrain from Africa will continue, and the need for expatriates will increase, when institutions of higher learning are financially starved. Sub-Saharan Africa lost 30% of its highly skilled manpower between 1960 and 1990, largely to the European Union countries. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa estimates that since the 1960s more than 50% of the Africans who pursued tertiary studies in chemistry and physics in the United States never returned to Africa. On the other hand, more than 100,000 expatriates from industrialised countries in the North are employed in Africa (Bekele, 1997).

The World Bank on Higher Education, Lessons of their Experience In Whose Education for All (Brock-Utne,2000a), I show that the emphasis on education for all has, in reality, meant that donors willingly, and African government unwillingly, have given a priority to investing in primary education, resulting in often drastic reductions in higher education funding. Four years after the Jomtien conference, the World Bank published the policy paper Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience (1994). It is worth mentioning that of the 152 bibliographic references mentioned in the back of the 1994 World Bank paper, only 32 (21%) are not World Bank publications or publications of Bank staff. This fact leads one to question whose experience is meant by the subtitle "The Lessons of Experience"? The World Bank is writing about their experience or rather their policies for

10 The 1994 World Bank paper on higher education is not a paper in defense of the higher education sector. On the contrary, it follows up the strong signals given in the Educational Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa (EPSSA) report of 1988. The proposed stagnation of higher education, which can be found in the EPSSA paper, is also a prominent feature of the higher education paper of 1994. The safeguards that people from the South thought they had managed to get into the Jomtien declaration do not seem to have had much effect on the World Bank's position in 1994. In the EPSSA study, the focus on higher education was principally on the public university sector, whereas in 1994 one of the main themes was that there should be diversification of higher education, with attention given to the whole range of private sector and non-university institutions. The neo-liberal agenda is even stronger in the 1994 paper than in the 1988 paper.

Lene Buchert (1995) asserts that any expectations that the World Bank higher education paper would defend the higher education sector against other priorities, and argue its relevance among and in relation to other sub-sectors of education, is not fulfilled. For these expectations to have been fulfilled, the document would have had to focus on the importance of both the traditional and modern goals of education. The paper would in that case have focused on higher education as a knowledge producer, a values and culture transmitter, and a capacity-builder for industry and business. Instead, the lens through which higher education is seen in the Bank's document is primarily an economic one. The Bank wants to reduce

11 university. The following are the main policy prescriptions around which the higher education paper (World Bank, 1994) is centred: •

A Redefined Role for the State in Higher Education. A predominant role is given to the market in relation to the state. This ignores the fact that in most African contexts there is no local industrial dominance and no powerful private sector with which the state can share the responsibility for higher education. Moreover, as Keith Watson (1995) demonstrates in an article on redefining the role of government in higher education, in many of the key country cases (e.g., OECD countries and NICs) the state has maintained an interventionist role in the higher education sector.

•

Institutional Differentiation. The World Bank gives a predominant role to the private sector among higher education institutions.

•

Diversification of Funding. The Bank introduces cost-sharing measures, including user fees, university partnerships with business, privatisation, and diversification of the higher education system. The assumption made by most advocates of user charges at the tertiary level is that net private returns would remain high enough, even after the imposition of fees for higher education, to make studies a rational personal investment. Yet, as argued

by Colclough (1995b), most of the evidence upon which this assumption is based uses earnings data from the 1960s and 1970s and does not accommodate the strong reductions in real earnings and earnings differentials between university graduates and other

12 secondary levels. In his criticism of the 1994 World Bank paper on higher education, Kenneth King (1995) finds that the paper announces presents a new conditionality: higher education only after adequate provision of primary and secondary education. The World Bank paper ignores the importance of a well-functioning higher education system in efforts to achieve quality at other sub-sectoral levels.

A life after Jomtien for higher education in Africa?

Studies after the 1990 Jomtien conference have shown that the focus of aid for education among many multilateral and bilateral donor agencies in the decade following Jomtien was increasingly shifted toward basic education. Lene Buchert (1995b, 1995c) shows that even agencies that had previously allocated the larger proportion of their bilateral education assistance to the higher education sub-sector adopted policies in favour of basic education after the “education for all” agenda adopted in Jomtien. This included, for example, the Italian Development Co-operation, the Dutch development agency DGIS (DiretoraatGeneral Internationale Samenwerkung), the UK-based Overseas Development Administration (ODA – now DFID – Department for International Development), and the French Ministry of Development Cooperation.

The increase in resource allocation toward basic education is often clearly indicated by the donor agencies as being undertaken at the expense of higher education. For instance Wolfgang Kuper of the German development agency (GTZ) notes:

13 These policies that African governments have felt forced to adopt— ,partly because of donor pressure, partly because of increased enrolments in higher education coupled with limited resources—, have had two direct consequences for universities in Africa: •

An increase in user fees at universities across Africa (as well as the elimination of book allowances, food allowances, and free tuition) have made the universities in Africa places of learning only for students from better-off families.

•

African university people feel compelled to seek donor support for their departments, faculty, and research institutes, by building links with more affluent universities in the industrialised world. They depend on these universities for money for research, for publishing their findings, to keep journals going, and for training of their junior staff.

As for the first point, even World Bank figures are unequivocal in showing that the majority of students in Africa—an average of about 60%—used to come from the ranks of the peasantry, workers, and small traders. These people are not likely to have the means to meet the increasing cost of university education. The natural outcome will be a decrease in enrolments and an increase in drop-out rates among students from poorer family backgrounds.

In Kenya's Moi and Egerton universities, for example, with a combined population of about 6,000 students, over 2,000 students were deregistered in early May 1996 over non-

14 regional consultation preparatory to the World Conference on Higher Education organised by UNESCO in Paris in 1998 starts by Recalling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 26 which affirms that: “Everyone has the right to education.”…and that “higher education shall be accessible to all, on the basis of merit,” and further recalling the Convention Against Discrimination in the field of Education adopted by UNESCO in 1960, which calls on Member States to “make higher education accessible to all, based on individual abilities.” (point 1,UNESCO, 1998:599) The Declaration goes on to: “strongly advise that the economic conditions of families be taken into consideration, and that the only criteria for access or non-access should be merit (point 40 UNESCO, 1998:610). This, unfortunately, has proven to be no more than wishful thinking.

In an article analysing the way policy formulations in developing countries took place in the decade from Jomtien (1990) to Dakar (2000), Rosa Maria Torres writes: Education for All 1990-2000 was essentially a top-down movement planned, conducted and evaluated by international and national political and technocratic elites, with scant information or encouragement to participate given to citizens, even to teachers and education researchers and specialists.

(Torres, 2001, p. 14) She tells how the education policy plans in this decade were drawn up by international agencies and discussed behind closed doors by a few national and international functionaries.

In the decade from 1990 to 2000, the world changed fundamentally but this is, according to Torres, not reflected in the Dakar document.

In the immediate post-independence years, the small numbers enrolled in Africa’s

15 with some representation from the different segments of society5 . He refers to recent studies which suggest that, despite explicit policy and much rhetoric on equitable access to education at all levels, the sources of recruitment into university have become even narrower during the last decade.

6

As for the second consequence of the new policies mentioned above, African universities have become increasingly more dependent on support from over-seas donors. The support to the universities in Africa from the North could, in theory, come as a grant that the universities themselves could use as they wanted. This is, however, seldom the case. In a paper on North and South partnership models in the university sector, Endashaw Bekele (1997) of Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia asserts that the support his university gets from SAREC (Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries) is superior to other donor support. This is so because SAREC is supplying a recurrent budget of foreign currency. This is a much better form of support than the provision of equipment (which often breaks down and for which there is no budget for repairs) or research money for certain projects of limited duration.

5

Obvious exceptions would be situations like apartheid South Africa, where access to education was deliberately discriminatory, or others where subtle cultural or religious conditions created gender, ethnic and

16

In search of the missing link In order to cope with the present situation, African institutions of higher learning have to go into partnership, or “link,� link arrangements with more affluent universities in the North or seek direct support from western donors. "Experts" from the North coming to teach and distribute the Western curricula are normally part of the link phenomenon. So are books written in the West, computers from the West, and scholarships for master's and Ph.D. students to go to the West to study the curricula offered there. Rarely are provisions made for students from the North to study in the South or for professors in the South to be visiting professors teaching in the North. No wonder, then, that many academics in the South develop a Westernized outlook.

An The editorial of an issue of the newsletter of the Academic Staff Assembly at the University of Dar es Salaam especially devoted to the link phenomenon discusses the dilemma surrounding university links with institutions outside the region: The situation at the University of Dar es Salaam is a microcosm of that in the nation as a whole. Here, in the midst of filthy toilets and classrooms with broken windows and furniture, thrives the LINK phenomenon. Virtually every department, under the threat of material and intellectual starvation, has been forced to establish links with one or more institutions, mostly from the West. We depend on the links for the training of our junior staff, for teaching material and equipment, and a host of other things. The link agreements are, almost without exception, as unequal as would be expected. This is despite some efforts to include clauses suggesting reciprocity... What is primarily at stake is that as we lose confidence in our own ability to sustain our education system we shall also have to abandon the pretence of determining our educational future

17 In 1990, the Tanzanian university teacher Karim F. Hirji came back to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Dar es Salaam after eight years of studying and working abroad. This is how he describes his experience with the “link” phenomenon: As one goes around the Faculty of Medicine, one wonders whether, after a hundred years after Karl Peters landed here, a second partition of Africa is in progress or not.

The Dental School seems to be run by the Finnish, the AIDS research program by the Swedes, community health programs by the Germans, with the British, Italian, Danish all having their own corners.

Hirji, 1990: 23 Hirji (1990: 23) further writes that he is definitely in favour of international exchange, and that such exchange should be cultivated in any university. “However when such exchanges are solely conducted in the framework of a donor-recipient relation, what is there to guarantee that they are conducted on the basis of academic equality and mutual respect?” he asks. I shall return to this point later in this article.

The so-called "experts" and university people from the North go to Africa to teach, to "transfer" knowledge. In reality those of us from Europe and North America may have more to learn from Africans than they have from us. The fact that we are "experts" in our own countries, for instance, in competitive sports of a Western kind, women's law in Norway, research methods in a literate society, AIDS prevention in the North, or commercial forestry or fishery in the North Sea, for example, does not make us experts on the use of the body in Africa, women's law in Africa, research methods among an illiterate population, the spreading of AIDS in Africa, sexual norms among various African groups, African agro-forestry, or

18 traditional medicine? How much do we listen and learn to appreciate the indigenous knowledge?

To establish a North-South co-operation in the university sector which is truly symmetrical is an accomplishment that must be regarded as idealistic at best, given the unequal distribution of resources in this world. The mere fact that one party is giving the money and is a "donor," while the other party receives the money and is a "recipient," signifies a disempowering and asymmetrical relationship. I have in other publications examined some examples of university link arrangements between African universities and universities overseas (Brock-Utne, 1999; Brock-Utne, 2000a). Several of the examples show that Norwegian academics have been too domineering, too eager to teach or transfer knowledge and showed too little concern for a symmetrical relationship, for development of knowledge built on African roots and on contemporary African society. These are examples I happen to know. And, while they involve Norwegian academics and universities, but there would be no problem finding other examples involving academics from other European or North - American universities I believe other examples involving academics from other European or North American universities must certainly exist.

Increased support to the university sector in Africa from a non-apologetic Bank Within the last few years, the specific problems of African higher education have

19 The World Bank remains the World Bank, and it rarely apologizes or acknowledges a mistake 7 , but two recent Bank documents dramatize this change of emphasis. Both are major publications.

The Task Force on Higher Education and Society, a body of experts from 13 countries convened by the World Bank and UNESCO to explore the future of higher education in the developing world, authored the first publication, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise (World Bank, 2000). The second, more recent publication is called Constructing Knowledge—Challenges for Tertiary Education (World Bank, 2002). After over a decade of pressuring developing countries, as well as the donor community, to cut down on higher education and give priority to basic education, the World Bank appears in these two publications to realize that higher education is essential for the survival of a nation. In the words of Henry Rosovsky, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, and Co-Chair of the Task Force on Higher Education and Society: Higher education is the modern world's "basic education," but developing countries are falling further and further behind. It's time to drive home a new message: higher education is no longer a luxury, it is essential to survival. 8 World Bank, 2000, p. ??

The new millennium has thus started with new World Bank loans to African nations for higher education development. Apart from these new loans, agencies have also been encouraged once again to give aid to tertiary education in Africa. Sawyerr (2002) mentions

20 African Universities.” This, the “4 Foundations Partnership,” proposes to provide up to $100 million in support of selected African universities or higher education systems over a fiveyear period. While some support has been committed and useful case studies commissioned, it is not wholly clear exactly how the project will work.

While the World Bank has come to realize that the African universities are essential for the development of Africa, it has not, however, changed its neo-liberal agenda or its belief that, ultimately, growth will reduce poverty. The argument is now that “strengthening the capacity of tertiary education institutions to respond flexibly to the new demands of knowledge societies will increase their contribution to poverty reduction through the longterm economic effects and the associated welfare benefits that come from sustained growth.”

(World Bank, 2002, p. xxxi). Today, tertiary education is given the job of reducing or alleviating poverty. At the 2000 Education for All Conference in Dakar, primary education was given that job. I agree with Rosa Maria Torres, who wrote after the Dakar conference: The “poverty alleviation” discourse continues to be repeated over and over again, while in this very decade we reached a point where we need to ask ourselves whether the problem is to improve education in order to alleviate poverty or to rather to alleviate poverty in order to improve education and, moreover, to make education and learning possible. Trust is still placed in economic growth as the solution to social equity, while what was reaffirmed in this decade is that growth is not enough,… wealth is becoming ever more concentrated in a few hands.

Torres, 2001, p. 10 Rather than economic growth, we need a redistribution of resources. Rather than a

21

The costs of the Makerere miracle Because of deteriorating terms of trade and high costs of debt servicing, the government of Uganda did not have the funds to cover the demand for higher education by the 1980s. It bought into the solution which comes with the neo-liberal agenda: make education a commodity, sell what can be sold, privatize what can be privatized. The analysis of what happened at Makerere is interesting for two reasons: •

The restoration of the university from one that had almost fallen to pieces to a functioning institution and the way this was achieved is looked at as a miracle and a success story by the Task Force authors

•

Sawyerr (2002, drawing extensively on Musisi, 2001) is much more skeptical to this miracle and asks at what costs it has been achieved 9 .

In 1992, the Government of Uganda allowed Makerere University to charge fees for evening courses and special programmes. Taking advantage of this, the Faculties of Law and of Commerce started evening classes exclusively for paying students. In 1995, the University Council allowed Faculties to admit fee-paying students to fill quotas not taken up by government-sponsored students. The result was that from a 1993/94 enrolment of 3,361— made up of 2,299 government-sponsored and 1062 private students—the situation metamorphosed to a total enrolment of 14,239—made up of 1,923 government-sponsored and 12,316 private students—in 1999/00, with no significant increases in the resources available

22 subvention. Average staff incomes rose above a “living wage,” facilitating staff retention and, indeed, the return of some who had left the university during the difficult days. The curriculum was expanded and diversified, mainly in response to demands arising from the economic and social environment. Still, both the housing and learning environments for students and the research environment for the academic staff suffered considerably under “the miracle.” The Musisi et. al (2001) study referenced by Sawyerr finds it “remarkable how little attention has been paid to student welfare compared to that given to their capacity to pay and provide the university with income.” The study tells of “unbearable pressure on space, facilities and staff, as there had been little increase in physical infrastructure.” Nor had there been any “significant” increase in building space or the numbers of lecturers, despite the tripling of the student population. Not surprisingly, a report issued by the Makerere University Academic Staff Association found that …more than half the registered students in some courses did not attend lectures because of a lack of seats and poor audibility in the lecture halls. Such insufficient facilities and high student-lecturer ratios compromise academic quality. here taken from Sawyerr,2002,p.56 Needs citation here: name, date, page The study itself concludes If the problem [of insufficient facilities and staff] is not addressed, the large number of students and the resulting decline in standards pose a real danger to the quantitative achievements and innovations in admissions and programming made by Makerere over the last seven years. here taken from Sawyerr,2002,p.56 Needs citation here: name, date, page Income generated in the new ways goes to benefit the faculties/units that generated it

23 Not only does this result in severe imbalances in the distribution of “earned” revenue, it also means that the allocation of the new revenues among university activities no longer corresponds to university or national priorities, but follows the logic of the market! Is this relative under-funding of science and technology what Makerere wishes, or Uganda needs?

Sawyerr, 2002, p. 56

An education that is of Africa and for Africa Julius Nyerere, the first president of the Republic of Tanzania, was one of the most prominent thinkers on education in Africa. His educational philosophy is best outlined in the 1968 publication Education for Self-Reliance. In it he stressed that education in Africa at any level must inculcate a sense of commitment to the total community and help the students to “accept the values appropriate to our kind of future, not those of our colonial past” (Nyerere, 1968, p. 52). He explained what he meant by this: “This means that the educational system of Tanzania must emphasise co-operative endeavour, not individual advancement” (Nyerere, 1968, p. 52). These values are very different from the ones now in vogue and actively promoted by Western donors, institutions, and consultants who aid them.

In its 2002 publication Constructing Knowledge Societies, the World Bank applauds the decision by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer all its courses free of charge on the web. This may be more worthy of praise if there was some reciprocity in it.

What Africa needs is to develop its own courses, research, and publications, more directly suited to situations in Africa. The World Bank also applauds the agreement among six leading

24 A book by Kenneth King and Simon McGrath (2002) on education, training and development in Africa examines this issue further and came out of work on the “Learning to Compete” project commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department For International Development (DFID). The project developed a partnership amongst researchers in the following three African countries: Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as with researchers in Scotland. Strategies for the Africans to survive in the current world, must, according to King and McGrath, become strategies to compete better in markets increasingly impacted by globalisation. The authors hold the position that globalisation leads to a competitiveness that will be based on the knowledge and skills possessed and utilised by individuals, enterprises and nations. The core theme of the book is what the authors call “learning-led competitiveness.” The authors are of the opinion that “at the core of the globalisation message is the argument that pockets of activity isolated from the global market are rapidly diminishing. It is essential, therefore, that policy interventions and projects that seek to help the poor survive better are closely intertwined with policies for competitiveness” (King and McGrath, 2002, p. 11).

When the authors write about skills, they are primarily writing about what they call “high level skills” or “core learning skills” which are requirements for knowledge workers.

These are the skills that, according to the authors, knowledge workers in Africa need to acquire in order to compete in the current process of knowledge-driven globalisation. Rote

25 The authors do not seem to criticize the value of competition or ask how it, if at all, can be reconciled with the cooperative endeavours that still are important values in Africa.

They do not ask the questions: Whose knowledge are we talking about? Knowledge developed by whom to profit whom? King and McGrath (2002) do not use their work to attempt to explain why rote learning is going on in most African class-rooms and even universities, but this is a concern that deserves further consideration.

For some of us who have visited many classrooms and lecture halls in countries across Africa, the rote learning situation of students is a familiar phenomenon. In lecture halls I have seen how students take down every word the teacher says and copy notes which they then try to memorise. The situation is partly also caused by the fact that there is a scarcity of textbooks. Often the only textbook that exists is the one the teacher or professor reads from and uses when s/he writes notes on the blackboard. My daughter, who studied for one year at the University of Dar es Salaam, experienced a situation where none of the books mentioned on the reading list was available in the book-store. The books were normally just available in one copy in the library. That copy was put on special reserve, and one could check it out for one hour. In one instance, after having waited a very long time to take out the book from the reserve desk, she eventually got hold of the book only to find that the chapter which was required reading had been torn out of the book.

The Language Issue at the African Universities

26 language you do not command (Brock-Utne, 2001; Brock-Utne, 2001 (ed.);Brock-Utne et. al (eds.), 2003; Prah, 2003)?

In the 1990 UNESCO-UNICEF publication African Thoughts on the Prospects of Education for All, the African educationist Babs Fafunwa wrote: We impart knowledge and skills almost exclusively in foreign languages, while the majority of our people, farmers, and craftsmen perform their daily tasks in Yoruba, Hausa, Wolof, Ga, Igbo, Bambara, Kiswaili, etc‌The question is: Why not help them to improve their social, economic, and political activities via their mother tongue?.

Why insist on their learning English or French first before modern technology could be introduced to them?

(Fafunwa, 1990: 103) The use of a foreign language as language of instruction is also a grave problem at the university. Even in an African country like Tanzania, where all the students and lecturers communicate in Kiswahili outside of the class-room, the language of instruction and exam writing is English.

In 1997, the Tanzanian researcher Grace Puja interviewed 34 second-year female students as well as 22 university teachers in connection with her Ph.D.research. She explains in a forthcoming article that her interest in the role of Kiswahili in Tanzanian higher education was prompted by some of the findings of this study (Puja, 2002). She had written her interview guide in English, since she was taking her Ph.D. in Canada and had expected to conduct the research in English. Her interview subjects had, after all, had English as the language of instruction for eight years. She found, however, that most of the Tanzanian

27 competent in either spoken or written English. This is an observation Puja made during her field work: During class observations and during my visits at the three University campuses, I noted that most students (male and female) do not speak in class [where the medium of instruction is English] but as soon as the class is over, both teachers and students switch to Kiswahili and communicate freely.

Puja, 2002, p. 1 Today, no university in Sub-Saharan Africa has an indigenous African language as the language of instruction. The languages of instruction at the universities in Sub-Saharan Africa are European languages: English, French, Portuguese, Dutch10 (in South Africa), and Italian (when the university in Somalia was still functioning). 11 Ali Mazrui (1996) argues that the choice of European languages as the media of instruction in African universities has had profound cultural consequences for the societies served by those universities. He gives as an example professional Japanese scientists who can organise a conference and discuss professional matters entirely in Japanese. (He could have also mentioned Korean, German, Norwegian, or Finnish scientists who do the same.) Mazrui states: "But a conference of African scientists, devoted to scientific matters, conducted primarily in an African language, is for the time being sociologically impossible" (Mazrui, 1996, p. 4).

Generally, Mazrui is correct when he maintains that almost all black African intellectuals conduct their most sophisticated conversations in European languages. "It is because of this that intellectual and scientific dependency in Africa is inseparable from

28 Kenya, who said: "When the white man came to Africa he had the Bible and we had the land.

And now? We have the Bible and he has the land" (ibid, p. 5). Culture, including language, was offered in exchange for material goods. The West exported its ideas and languages and imported Africa’s riches.

In its publication on higher education, the World Bank (1994) does not even mention the language question. For the further growth and development of a language, its use as language of instruction at higher levels is of fundamental importance. The West African educational researcher Adama Ouane from Mali, now the Director of the UNESCO Institute of Education in Hamburg, Germany has accurately observed: Unless these languages (the indigenous African languages) can step beyond the door of primary schooling, and face the challenges of secondary and higher education, with increased number of subjects to deal with, their modernisation will be achieved only half-way.

Ouane, 1991, p. 10 At the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, however, there is one department and one institute that use an African language as the language of instruction: the Department of Kiswahili and the Institute of Kiswahili Research. Referring to the history of the Department of Kiswahli, Zaline Makini Roy-Campbell (1992a, 1992b) counters the frequently heard argument that the African languages do not have a vocabulary that is developed enough to be languages of scholarship and instruction at higher levels in the educational system. She holds that this department gives a good practical example of the coinage of technical words which

29 standardised. Some words were used side by side as synonyms. English terminologies were used until Kiswahili terms were developed. Some English terms became Kiswahilized and some terms were found in some of the other languages of Tanzania. The process of creating new words was done with the assistance of all teachers in the Department of Kiswahili and the Institute for Kiswahili Research. This example illustrates that the fact that a language develops and grows through use.

The Link That Is Really Missing At the installation of the University of Zambia on July 12, 1966, President Kenneth Kaunda gave an address in which he stressed that the people of Zambia had every reason to be very proud of their university. “The University of Zambia is our own university in a very real sense,” he said. He told how the ordinary people of Zambia helped to build the university: Humble folk in every corner of our nation—illiterate villagers, barefooted schoolchildren, prison inmates and even lepers—gave freely and willingly everything they could, often in the form of fish or maize or chickens. The reason for this extraordinary response was that our people see in the university the hope of a better and fuller life for their children and grand-children.

Kaunda, 1966, taken from Ajayi, Goma, & Johnson, 1996, p. 1 In their book the African Experience with Higher Education, Ajayi, Goma, and Johnson (1996) state that the address by Kaunda at the inauguration of the University of Zambia captured the communal pride and identity, which everywhere initially greeted the coming of the University to Africa. But they wonder about “the real sense” in which the African people

30 Ajayi, Goma, and Johnson (1996) present the debate about what constitutes the African university and how to make the University the “very own University of African peoples� as central to the African experience with higher education. Xabier Gorostiaga, rector of the University of Central America (UCA) in Managua, Nicaragua, is concerned with the same question when it comes to the situation of Latin American universities: What, then does it mean to train "successful" professionals in this sea of poverty?

Does an institution that does not confront the injustice surrounding it, that does not question the crisis of a civilization that is ever less universalizable to the great majorities of the world, merit the name "university"? Would not such an institution be simply one more element that reproduces this unequal system?

Gorostiaga, 1993, p. 29 What is really missing in most of the universities in the South is the link between academia and the ordinary people.

Values and knowledge creation, particularly through independent and basic research, is critically important in order to develop the African continent as a creator of science and technology and not simply a consumer of imported versions. This knowledge creation has to be produced together with the local people. Examples of the missing link between local and university know-how can be found in most departments in all of the universities in Africa.

University know-how has come about through studying texts which are relevant in the North but not necessarily in the South.

Xabier Gorostiaga (1993) writes about professors of business administration in the South who cannot research businesses of twenty workers because such businesses do not use

31 The missing link is between the universities and the masses of people in Africa, between the macro (policies adopted, though often unwillingly, by national governments) and the micro (local experiences). There is a lack of what Gorostiaga calls "people-bridges" capable of creating communication links among different local experiences, of promoting experimentation among them, or of pushing viable national programs based on their successes. Aklilu Habte, the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Addis Abeba stated that: The truly African university must be one that draws its inspiration from its environment, not a transplanted tree, but one growing from a seed that is planted and nurtured in the African soil. quoted in Karani, 1998, p. ?

Attention to Local Knowledge Even the Jomtien declaration mentions the need to base curricula in the South on local knowledge. The preamble to the World Declaration on Education for All (WCEFA, 1990) states that "traditional knowledge and indigenous cultural heritage have a value and validity in their own right and a capacity to both define and promote development." In light of the "education for all" emphasis, Professor Komba of the University of Dar es Salaam stresses the need to "analyze the possibilities to revive and use dying traditional learning systems in various tribes" in an assessment of the Tanzanian "education for self-reliance" policy (Komba, 1996, p. 6). In the book Local Knowledge and Wisdom in Higher Education

32 outlook? Ali Mazrui (1978: 352) notes that "the full maturity of African education will come only when Africa develops a capacity to innovate independently." This independent innovation may incorporate elements from the West but must be based in African roots.

In his book on academic freedom in Africa, Ali Mazrui notes that any academic freedom in Africa is being devalued by intellectual dependency: It was not the traditional African that resembled the ape; it was the more Westernized one, fascinated by the West’s cultural mirror. A disproportionate number of these cultural “apes” were and continue to be products of universities. Those African graduates who have become university teachers themselves have on the whole remained intellectual imitators and disciples of the West. African historians have begun to innovate methodologically as they have grappled with oral traditions, but most of the other disciplines are still condemned to paradigmatic dependency. This includes those African scholars who discovered Karl Marx just before Europe abandoned him.

Mazrui, 1994, p. 119 Staf Callewaert, who has done extensive research in Namibia, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, tries to explain why one seldom finds African researchers questioning Western schooling as such: "As a rule you cannot expect the educated African to use much energy to reconstruct and problematize the break, by which he or she became exactly what they are: educated in a modern Western sense of the word" (Callewaert, 1994: 108).

According to the Tanzanian biologists Adelaida Semesi and Felister Urassa (1991), many African women have accumulated knowledge about some of the causes and effects of crop failures and spoiled food and have devised ways to overcome such problems. Some solutions work very well. Moreover, village women are great science teachers in the fields of

33 food preservation, for instance, through drying or smoking meat. 12 This knowledge is certainly worthy of academic research and investigation and could possibly lead to agricultural advancements not yet discovered.

Lancy (1996) points to sensitive and open-minded research by ecological anthropologists in recent years which has shown that the kind of subsistence practices followed by slash-and-burn horticulturalists, such as the Kpelle people in Liberia, instead of being inefficient, are wonderfully adapted to the local ecology. He sees Western aid, whether in the area of agriculture or schooling, as something which destroys the original culture and sets the Kpelle society on to the Kwii way. (Kwii in the Kpelle language is a general term that refers to Westerners and Liberians who dress and talk like Westerners, live in towns, participate in the cash economy, and so on.) In order to avoid African societies going further on the Kwi way, according to Lancy, African universities need to pursue research based on local experience in collaboration with the people of Africa. 13 What is most needed now is for African researchers to be able to develop academic fields from African roots.

Archie Mafeje (1992), writing on the indigenization of intellectual discourse in Africa, reminds African intellectuals of the guiding principle in Socratic thought: "Know thyself."

Looking at African philosophical thought, he finds grounds for reconstruction and selfrealisation. He sees that unwritten accounts, transmitted in stories, legends, myths, and so on reflect African philosophical thought in various ways and are sources of high significance and

34 authenticity. In an article on the teaching of philosophy in African universities, Kwasi Wiredu (1984) laments: An African may learn philosophy in a Western institution of higher learning abroad or at home and become extremely adroit in philosophical disputation; he may even be able to make original contributions in some branch of philosophy. The fact remains that he would be engaged in Western, not African philosophy. Surprisingly, many Africans accept this; they have even seemed to take it as a matter of course...The usual practice seems to reserve all references to African conceptions to classes on African philosophy. As far as the main branches of philosophy are concerned, African philosophical ideas might just as well be non-existent. This trend, I suggest, ought to be reversed.

Wiredu, 1984, p. 31-32 Wiredu makes himself a spokesperson for the strategy of "counter-penetration." This strategy is meant to impress upon the world that it has something to learn from Africa, that in the global culture which is evolving, the West would do well to listen to Africa. 14 It is a strategy also mentioned by Ali Mazrui (1978: 350), who raises the question whether African universities that have been so permeated by Western culture in turn can affect Western thoughts and values. Mazrui thinks this is possible and outlines his strategies of domestication, diversification, and counterpenetration (Mazrui, 1978). The balance of cultural trade between the North and the South has to be restored. The strategy will not work, however, unless Africa builds on its own foundation and stops mimicking the West. Neither will it work before Africa is allowed to work out its own educational policies instead of being forced to adopt those worked out by the World Bank or by donors overseas.

35 higher education. These policies should, according to Obanya, follow certain systematic steps. They must first contain statements about what type of learning should be undertaken, “what types of activity are of the greatest worth , and how should these be reflected in higher education?”(Obanya, 1999, p. 548). After an agreement has been reached on such issues, a statement of the qualities expected of academic and other staff must follow. According to Obanya (1999, p. 549): “Higher education in Africa in the years to come has to be guided by national policies, which are understood and accepted by the populations it is supposed to serve.” But, as we have seen above, the Makerere “miracle” has not been guided by national policies but by advice from the World Bank and the neo-liberal agenda it adheres to. This agenda makes it difficult for any country to govern according to national policies.

I agree with Obanya, Wiredu, and Mazrui that African researchers need to develop national policies of higher education and develop academic fields from African roots. The West can help by showing interest in the endeavour, giving economic support, and no longer sending so-called "experts" who come to teach and not to learn. These experts or consultants often have the audacity to impose Western culture on a defenceless continent that is now lost because of colonial and neo-colonial interventions, a continent that needs to return to a familiar point—its own roots—before rushing on.

36

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COOPERATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION: VISIONS, MODELS AND EXPERIENCES: WHAT WORKS BY

PROFESSOR PJM SSEBUWUFU, VICE CHANCELLOR, MAKERERE UNIVERSITY

PRESENTED BY

PROFESSOR L.S. LUBOOBI

AT

THE NORWEGIAN COUNCIL FOR HIGHER EDUCATION /SIU CONFERENCE 6 – 7TH OCTOBER 2003.

Introduction Historical Background Makerere University is one of the oldest tertiary institutions in Africa, set up during the colonial era. Its history is long, varied, and interesting. The University began as a humble technical school, established in 1922 with a class of 14 students, three European and two African tutors. Over the years, it expanded, becoming a Centre for Higher Education in East Africa in 1935, a University College, and eventually a University. In 1949, the College assumed the title of the University College of East Africa and courses leading to the award of general degrees of the University of London in Arts and Sciences were instituted at the beginning of 1950.

In June 1963, the University of East Africa was established and the links with the University of London closed. On 1st July 1970, Makerere became the National University of the Republic of Uganda.

Today Makerere University is growing by leaps and bounds. There is currently a student population of about 22,000 post and undergraduate students, both government and privately sponsored. While a small majority of the students is on government scholarship, over 80% of the annual intake is privately sponsored. This fits in with the 1989 Educational Review Recommendation and World Bank Initiative, which emphasises that those in tertiary institutions should meet the cost of their education.

As the University faces the new millennium, it has continued to receive international recognition and acclaim and recaptured most of its former glory. Makerere has now become a role model of how a declining African university can be turned around into an institution of excellence. The World Bank and UNESCO have also cited it as being far ahead of many universities in implementing the reforms that are crucial to the revitalization of universities in the developing countries.

Makerere has since it was established, been at the pinnacle of university education in the entire East African region and beyond. It as a result, produced a number of the first political leaders of East Africa. It has also contributed greatly to the formation of a large number of public service corps, academicians and other civil society leaders in the region. Makerere University alumni were largely responsible for the successful transition from 1

colonial to independent administrators in East Africa and beyond.

Furthermore today, Makerere University products contribute immensely to the national and regional development in not only East Africa, but also Africa as a whole.

The University today is reasserting itself as a leading institution on the global scene by maintaining and building academic freedom, and reestablishing itself as a model of higher education in the region. The road to the top has not been smooth, and during the 70s and early 80s, the University struggled to exist because of the political and economic instability in the country. This turbulent period saw a number of both senior expatriate and Ugandan academics leave for good and exile respectively.

However, the University persevered with the support from friendly organizations that have continued to train Ugandan academicians who in turn have kept the University running.

Makerere University is working towards complementing the Government policy of increased access to education. This has been done by the government supplementing funding for capital and current budgets. To date, the University meets over 60% of its capital budget from own internally generated resources.

The University enjoys the support of the international community and all the neighbouring universities in Eastern Africa and the rest of Africa. The support from the various donors who include Sida/SAREC, the Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur, Sasakawa, JICA and NORAD among others has been well utilized for the development of the University. The support from these donors and other development partners is a result of the transformation and innovations that have taken place at Makerere in recent times. The donor support is well utilised by the University for its development in various ways like training staff (staff development), research and infrastructure.

NORAD is supporting the University with institutional development, NUFU is supporting the capacity and competence development through collaborative research, the World Bank through the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) is supporting the University to offer a regional Masters degree in Economic Policy Management for improved economic policy management capacity throughout Africa, and SIDA/SAREC is extending support in research and training of University staff to develop 2

capacity in research through PhD programmes. institutional support.

Donors provide major

International Cooperation Makerere, like any other University cannot exist in isolation. Today there is an emphasis on the internationalisation higher education. The rationale behind this is based on the fact that universities provide education and conduct research of the knowledge and values, which are not limited to a specific country or culture, but related to the universality of knowledge. It is therefore vital that universities all over the world operate as one global family in the quest for new frontier of knowledge because it has replaced the Victorian type of industrial revolution. Today the world economies are pivoted on knowledge.

Universities today more than ever before have to work together towards the common good of development. The universal nature of knowledge, a long tradition of international collegiality and cooperation in research, have all underscored the importance of internationalisation. Higher education today should offer solutions to the existing problems and be innovative enough to avoid the problems of tomorrow. Higher education is expected to contribute to raising the overall quality of life, worldwide. To fulfil its role effectively and maintain excellence, higher education must become far more internationalised and integrate an international dimension into its teaching, research and service functions.

Preparing future leaders and citizens for a highly interdependent world, requires a higher education system in which internationalisation promotes cultural diversity and fosters inter cultural understanding, respect and tolerance among all people. Such internationalisation of higher education contributes to building more than economically competitive and politically powerful regional blocks. Rather, internationalisation of higher education should be vanguard of common understanding and international cooperation, able to bridge the different competing regional economies and political blocks of the world. It should not lose sight of its role as the voice of the least privileged of the world.

3

Highly educated human resources as well as high quality research are essential elements to the increasingly knowledge-based development everywhere. International cooperation and internationalisation can serve to improve higher education by increasing efficiency in teaching and learning as well as research through shared efforts and joint actions.

It is therefore essential that in considering options for international cooperation, higher education institutions, their leaders, with support of the academic community, develop clear institutional internationalisation policies and programmes that are seen as integral to the life of the institution and as such enjoy adequate international and external funding.

It is also vital that the university’s curriculum reflects an understanding of global, international and regional issues and also prepares experts in areas needed for such fields as information technology, sciences, good governance, peace and conflict resolution and sustainable development as well as the special curricula needs of international students.

North–South cooperation in higher education with a focus on human resource development should be recognized as a major instrument and be given adequate support and funding by national and international development agencies, intergovernmental agencies and private foundations.

What is more important, however, is that all internationalisation programmes should be funded on the principle of equal partnership.

Makerere University and International Cooperation Makerere University is a showcase of how a University in near ruins can overturn decay to prominence on the local and international scene. Its story has been one of a successful transformation given a national context of economic growth and political stability. David Court of the World Bank has referred to this transformation as “The Quiet Revolution” which has seen the University move from the brink of collapse to a point where it can become ‘the pre-eminent intellectual and capacity building resource in Uganda and the wider region’.

Makerere University is undergoing a strategic planning process, which covers both fundraising and financing of the University, and is central to the reform process. The plan basically sets out the agenda for enhancing

4

academic development. International donors sponsor the process to a large extent.

Under its new five-year strategic plan for the academic years 2000/01 – 2004/05, the University adopted a new Vision and Mission statement. The Makerere Vision is ‘to be a centre of academic excellence, providing worldclass teaching, research and service relevant to sustainable development for Uganda’. The Mission on the other hand is ‘to provide high quality teaching, carry out relevant research and offer professional services to meet the changing needs of society. The aim is to utilize worldwide and internally generated information and communication technology to enhance the University’s leading position in Uganda and beyond’.

In the current strategic plan, the University is steered towards: §

Transformation of teaching and learning through application of pedagogic and information technology and curriculum reform.

§

Further devolution of powers to operational units.

§

Relating University education to the needs of society.

§

Taking forward the development of a critical mass of science and technology, research and human resources to harness natural resources and seize opportunities from national and international scientific breakthroughs.

§

Gender mainstreaming.

Makerere has as a result of its strategic plan and needs assessment, forged a series of partnerships with a number of international organizations (donors), universities and the Uganda government. Makerere has been successful in attracting donor funding and cooperation through successfully drawing up the strategic plan and through implementing successful academic reforms in its curriculum and development policies. The University has in the process revitalized itself, so as to provide a sound educational system to its students.

5

However, Makerere’s relationship with the external donors has been paramount in revitalizing it. Whereas the Government of Uganda has been seen to gradually pull out from higher education and slowly reduce the funding to universities, the donor community has played an important and determining role in providing the much-needed funds to continue with some basic programmes, and to increase and improve on the infrastructure.

Donors have often earmarked and limited themselves to specific projects, and often set strict conditions for disbursement of funds like reporting and accountability. Makerere has been fortunate to enjoy a degree of institutional autonomy and also maintain credibility.

International Cooperation has come in a number of models to Makerere University. What has clearly come through, however, is that it has contributed to the improvement of the quality and relevance of higher education and research. It has also made Makerere more internationally competitive and attractive. The focus has basically been to improve the quality of education in the University, and to relate its curricular to the basic needs of the society.

Initial support came in through NORAD’s Institutional Development Programme (IDP) which channelled NOK 110 million (US$12 million) over five years starting from 2000 to support the development of human resources in technical fields and practical orientation of graduates. NORAD support covers the Faculties of Forestry and Agriculture; development and application of ICT through the administrative Computer Support Unit; the strategic planning process; the establishment and development of a Metrological Unit, tracer studies on graduate employability through the Department of Planning and Development; Education Outreach Programmes; Gender Mainstreaming and the Department of Botany.

NORAD support to the University has been significant in the sense that it has also supported physical infrastructure (expansion of space) through the erection of buildings of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Institute of Computer Science and the Department of Food Science and Technology.

The Rockefeller Foundation has also supported the University through the assessment of human resource needs for the decentralization policy which the government of Uganda has adopted as the new concept of good governance since 1997, building capacity for training human resources for 6

decentralized district service delivery and conducting research to inform public policy in this area. The three- year support from 2001 will cost US$17.6 million and will get matching funds from the World Bank through the Ministry of Finance.

Other international cooperation has been from the African Capacity Building Fund through the Economic Policy Management (EPM) training programme, which used to be offered by McGill University in Montreal, Canada. This, as stated earlier, will strengthen the institutional and human capacity of Makerere University to offer graduate level economic policy management skills and to train a critical mass of Ugandans and East and Southern African professional policy advisors and managers with professional skills. The programme hosted by the Institute of Economics was initially costed at US$2m.

Another substantial programme is the Sida/SAREC Support for research activities that is a bilateral collaboration. It has supported research in health, waste management, social, economic and political changes, technological aspects and environmental concerns based in the Faculties of Social Sciences, Technology and Agriculture. The programme aims at establishing a linkage between senior research scientists in Makerere University and Swedish Universities and building capacity of Makerere University researchers. The programmes worth SEK 15 million has also introduced cross cutting courses for PhD students, established a functioning laboratory structure and developed other cross cutting courses to support research administration and ICT and offered bibliographic support.

The Information and Communications Technology Strategy has also been widely supported by donor funding which includes NORAD, USAID, AFDB, and Sida/SAREC. Makerere University through this support has developed and implemented an ICT Policy and Master Plan which provides a framework within which administrative departments will increase their ICT capacity and utilization and have an optimally integrated University wide system.

Through development of ICT, the University has developed a web page through which it can reach out and also be reached by the international community.

7

Basically the international cooperation between Makerere and donor agencies has focused on capacity building through training human resource, expansion of infrastructure and research, all of which eventually lead to the development of a self-sustaining University.

Other donors have included the Carnegie Cooperation of New York, which has heavily supported Gender Mainstreaming and provided scholarships for female undergraduate students; JICA – poverty eradication; Pfizer and The Melinda Gates Foundation for HIV/AIDS research and development of an AIDS vaccine; the Norwegian Council for Development Research and Education (NUFU) for research collaboration in sciences, and many others.

Other forms of international cooperation have been on a university-touniversity basis, which includes collaboration in research, external examining, joint programmes, training of academic staff and publications.

What Works Collaboration between Universities gives students and staff from Makerere University an opportunity to work jointly with their counterparts from other universities and in so doing exchange experiences and widen knowledge scope. These models of cooperation are beneficial to both parties and increase knowledge capacity and expertise. One example of such is University of Bergen in Norway, which collaborates with Makerere in collaborative research supported by NUFU, Norwegian Council and NIVA in sharing and exchanging of library resources, and automation of the finance and personnel departments at Makerere.

Other Norwegian universities and institutions which collaborate with Makerere University are; the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the Agricultural University of Norway, the University of Oslo, the University of Tromso, the Oslo School of Architecture, the Stavanger Faculty of Theology, the Romerike Folk Music School and the Royal Norwegian Veterinary School.

These collaborative partnerships have helped Makerere in its internationalisation drive and given its partners from the different parts of the world prominence and a new outlook beyond their local sphere of operation.

8

Makerere has been successful in its international collaborative linkages as a result of its policy frameworks for institutional rather than individualized cooperation schemes. The University has ensured that the linkages benefit not only specific units in the University, but are as far reaching as possible, and can be sustained over a long-term to benefit the University and country now and in the future.

Training staff involved in the collaborative projects has placed emphasis on, not only to aspects relating specifically to Makerere University but Uganda, and the wider community so as to contribute to developing locally adequate and attractive environments for creative work. Emphasis has also been placed on training opportunities for large groups within the local conditions to reduce brain drain.

The success of the partnerships, which Makerere University has developed over the years, is due to the objectives set out at the onset. These were drawn-up against a background of the institution’s strategic plan and the national policies. For any partnership to work, it must be imbedded within an institutional framework with explicit and well-articulated goals. It is therefore always important to include elements of education and research training that are in-line with the programmes offered within the host University, as is the case in Makerere University.

Makerere and its partners are often in contact to evaluate, assess and review the running of the programmes so as to either put right what has gone wrong or readjust according to changes in circumstances. Most of the programmes are assessed to establish their relevance, continuity and sustainability so as to fully benefit the two parties.

Makerere’s clear record of good governance has promoted the international cooperation drive. Its willingness to contribute to the funding and human resource when necessary has enabled it to attract even more partners.

Programmes have also been well funded and coordinated due to well-laid out proposals, which are often jointly prepared, and to joint decisionmaking. The budgets often provide some resources for supplementing the earnings of the persons involved in implementing the programmes which act as incentives and ensure commitment to the successful running and

9

completion of the programmes. The programmes create additional skills and future opportunities for enhancement to those working on them.

Through these institutional/international cooperation, Makerere University has discovered what it is in terms of what it can offer compared with others.

It is heartening to know that Makerere has something to offer internationally.

Conclusion: Makerere University has benefited tremendously from donor support and international cooperation and has made a mark on the international scene by consolidating the education and developmental aspects, which go hand in hand. Makerere, however, still has the challenge to further transform itself and make its graduates more relevant to the social, cultural and economic development aspects of the Uganda and international society, which are constantly changing.

According to Dr. Narciso Matos, the former Secretary General, Association of African Universities, Makerere’s basic objective, like that of any other University should be “to produce citizens that have respect for the basic rights of the individual, social justice and equity, democracy and freedom, and at the same time contribute to the improvement of the relevance and quality of teaching and research and offer quality education to all citizens, based on individual merits.”

By aiming at and fulfilling its objective, Makerere will have truly, realized its obligation to ‘Build For The Future’.

10

Bergen Cooperation in Higher Education: Visions, Models and Experiences. What works?

Experiences and dilemmas behind the Dykes.

Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Within the context of this whole impressive and impeccably organised conference, the organisers, SIU, asked us to combine discussions on the grand global issues of poverty eradication and the international trade in education services with the nitty-gritty of national higher education programmes. We are to address the following questions: How is our, Dutch, higher education cooperation with developing countries organised?

Why was this particular model chosen? And How successful has it been?

These are interesting questions put at an interesting moment in time: - Globally, the attention for higher education and research, for highly qualified people, for knowledge institutes producing those highly qualified people and producing, adapting and disseminating knowledge as crucial elements for development all over the world is growing again. We heard of some very good examples from the speakers yesterday. At the national level, at least in my country, there is still work to be done.

- In the Netherlands the current programmes for fellowships and cooperation are being phased out and are being replaced by new programmes. Why is that done? How are the new programmes set up, and why? And how successful are they so far?

The Netherlands has a long tradition and much experience in Cooperation in Higher Education. For the last ten years we had successful cooperation programmes. Why did de Dutch government want new programmes?

The old programmes, which are being phased out now, came in four groups, together some 60 million euros per year.

There were two groups of fellowships programmes; two of cooperation programmes: One of each for the universities and one of each for the Institutes for International Education.

Half of the cooperation and fellowship programmes, those for the universities and polytechnics (or Universities for Professional Education) were managed by the Nuffic; the

The new programmes had the laudable intention to improve certain shortcomings, but they tried to do so in experimental ways, rather than making use of the vast experience that exists both in our own country and abroad.

The laudable intentions were southern ownership and cost effectiveness. Who could argue with that?

The new programmes were to be more demand driven: needs assessment, demand identification and the articulation of demand were a matter of the South alone, no interference from Dutch institutes.

The quality / price ratio was to be improved. The new programmes are to match demand with what is on offer in the Netherlands by an open tender procedure. We are not untying aid yet, but the choice is to be as wide as possible and long lasting academic partnerships are to make way for the provision of services. The Dutch universities are not viewed as academic partners but as service providers.

Demand articulation is to culminate in a project outline that we use in a call for tender.

The fellowships are to be distributed over the courses on offer according to the relative demand for the different courses. The aim is to let demand influence the type of courses on offer and the content of courses so that they will be more to the liking of the demand side.

In this short introduction I just give you some of the more salient examples.

So the idea was to make the programmes more demand driven and to get a better quality price ratio. The ways are demand articulation as a solely southern exercise and a tender procedure What is the experience so far?s Needs assessment and demand identification take place at national level, with representatives from local governments, the Netherlands Embassy and local stakeholders. In this way institutes to be supported and the areas in which they are to be supported are chosen. The experience so far is mixed. Some countries, such as Mozambique, have a relatively small higher education system, a very clear idea about what they want and sound central leadership in the Minister for Higher Education; in other countries such as Vietnam, the amount of money, some 2 million euro per annum, does not warrant a comprehensive discussion on government level but nonetheless the demand identification was subject to a severe power

fixed tariffs would not be a solution. A lower price for a lecturer would simply mean a more junior member of staff or co-funding of the project by other government funded sources.

Secondly, the quality of project proposals is not likely to be better than it used to be. The southern ownership is in drawing up the call for tender; the Dutch university writes the project. The proposals do not constitute a better match with the needs and demands, because they are written to gain as many points in the tender evaluation as possible.

Thirdly the choice of Dutch partners does not prove to be bigger, but smaller. So far on each of the tenders we had only one or two bids.

And last but certainly not least, the view of the government on the role of higher education institutions as service providers has a negative effect on the enthusiasm of the universities to engage in development cooperation.

In the fellowships programmes demand for certain courses is to influence their content or the type of courses on offer. Demand for fellowships from 56 different countries is completely unstructured; there is only a very weak link with local needs and demands and the foreign demand through fellowship candidates is dwarfed by the demand from foreigners who come and study with their own resources. Again, a laudable idea but an approach based on wishful thinking rather than experience.

In the opinion of the Dutch universities, which they are to present to our Minister for Development Cooperation, needs assessment and demand identification should be commensurate with the amount of funding. With 50 million dollars you could enter into a discussion with the government on national level. With 2 million one should focus on one or two institutions.

A tender procedure is not a suitable instrument to match offer and demand in academic collaboration projects. They propose to have our southern partners draw up a project outline and then invite all the Dutch universities to express their interest, present their approach and list their expertise to tackle the problems. The southern institution then chooses its Dutch partner and they elaborate the project proposal together in the full knowledge of the funds available and the costs of each intervention. It may look a bit like our old programmes but to quote an African proverb: “ When lost it is better to return to a familiar point before rushing on�. The Nuffic will support the request of the Dutch institutes for Higher Education.

Now when I go to a conference I think about what I want to achieve with my contribution.

institutes have of their own role vis-Ă -vis development cooperation and on how these views are changing and what it means.

Thirdly I would like more people, in the North and in the South, to think about the most effective and sustainable ways of enhancing higher education and research in developing countries. The large number of participants from Norwegian academic institutions in this conference impresses me. And I would like to join hands with other organisations like the Nuffic in the North and with our partners in the South to improve the funding for support to higher education, but not only the funding. We need to be effective in capacity enhancement.

Lisbon Declaration or not, there was, is and will be a global war on brainpower. There are simply too few highly trained people in the world. Brain Drain has been going on for decades and will go on. It is indeed obscene to rob developing countries of their best and brightest. But it happens and we should try to make the best of a bad situation. Capacity enhancement is one way to mitigate the effects of brain drain, creating a working and research environment where scholars like to go back to, another. Not all brain drain is bad. An African scholar doing a PhD in the North contributes to northern knowledge accumulation but also to the enhancement of his or her capacities. If he stays on and works for a few years he helps northern institutions or businesses, but he also gains valuable experience, which he may use back home.

Another way could be to make use of the many retired teachers and professors who would love to fill the gaps in teaching and research in southern universities. If there are too few knowledge workers, we should stretch the use of the ones we have.

Finally I have two questions that perhaps merit some thought.

What are the major causes of poverty? In Europe we had for thousands of years, up to less than a century ago many very poor people. How did that come to an end? What was the role of our universities? Can we learn from our history?

We have in the Netherlands an annual budget of some 60 million euros for aid to higher education in developing countries. We work together with 15 countries and some thirty Dutch institutions. We do so in complex programmes with aid tied to our own universities. What do I answer to people who ask “Why do you not simply give 4 million per year to one or two universities in each country?

We are educated and paid to think. I hope politics and bureaucracy will not stop us from

Experiences of Research Cooperation Department for Research Cooperation Presented 7 October in Bergen, Norway at the Conference Policies and Models for International Cooperation in Higher Education

Assumptions: Poverty is Multidimensional and embedded in Local Contexts.

Poverty Reduction Strategies require knowledge

RESEARCH Universal Knowledge adapted to Local Context

Local Knowledge contribute to Universal Theory

University Education

Services

Layers of Bilateral Research Co-operation UNESCO FORUM, IAU

Scientific Information

Strategic Planning

Research & Research Training Collaboration with Universities in Neighboring Countries and/or Sweden

Research Management

Scientific Equipment

Association of African Universities

University Reform Local Research Grants

INASP, SCIDEV and Collexis

IFS/NUSESA

Progress of Bilateral Research Co-operation Takes 7-20+ years Mature Cooperation Teacher/Researcher/Student Exchange Post-Doc./Supervisor Training Leadership Training Ph.D.- Training Sandwich Model Masters Training Abroad

Local Ph.D.- Training Local Masters Training

Dimensions of Bilateral Research Co-operation External

Challenges

Curiosity

Resources

Research Management

h c r a e es

y il c Po

R Research Themes

Internal

Demand

Challenges to Bilateral Research Co-operation Harmonisation of Efforts and Requirements •Research policy •Jointly Support Elaboration of National Policy for S&T and HE in line with Poverty Reduction Strategies •Facilitate sharing of experiences to avoid “single model approach”, “business as usual”, “donor fads” or “fragmentation” •Donors & Collaborators should use S&T and HE Policy to design their contributions

Challenges to Bilateral Research Co-operation Harmonisation of Efforts and Requirements •Research Management •Harmonise Reporting Requirements (General format for Annual Reports) •Jointly Support Functions for Management and Administration of External Co-operation and Funds •Allow overheads to cover for costs related to Management

Challenges to Bilateral Research Co-operation Harmonisation of Efforts and Requirements •Research Themes •Allow for Local Curiosity •Contribute with Specialities •Find easy ways of information sharing between collaborators

A success story with wide reach and deep roots A UPCD approach to pedagogy Co-operation in Higher Education: Models, justifications and experiences. What works?

UPCD: University Partnership in Cooperation and Development

The importance of the findings • The potential reach is significant and if not well known should be shared • The potential role in effecting change • The degree to which this approach is unique

3 key aspects to cover • •

•

Background and basis of the premise for this approach (model?)

The features of the approach to international training delivery as experienced through the UPCD program The relevance of these findings

The background • The UPCD program, began in 1994; CIDA-funded partnerships between Canadian and Southern universities • Goal: to enhance human resource capacity to address local development and institutional needs • Projects: program and curriculum development or upgrading; teaching methods; lab and facility development or enhancement; and some research

UPCD Projects (1994 - ) Tier 1

Tier 2

Number of projects

29

76

Canadian Institutions

31

37

Overseas Developing Country Institutions

125

101

Number of countries

36

43

The approach to training in UPCD projects • Basis of premise is monitoring, including testimonials from students and professors • Student-centered delivery, professor as guide • Collegial relationship, non-hierarchical • Student has ownership of learning process • Practical application with focus on problemsolving, critical thinking, case studies, etc.

• Student input in evaluation process • Gender and cross-cultural sensitivity

Pedagogy Traditional Approaches

Features Encountered in UPCD Approach (although not encountered in all cases)

Professor-centered

Student-centered while professor directed

Professor as sage on the stage

Professor as guide on the side

Focus on theory

Practical application along with theory

Lecture style

Seminar style involving interaction and participatory learning techniques

Textbook-based learning

Experience-based learning as well

Focus on memory, acquiring information

Use of case studies, focus on problem-solving and critical thinking

Curriculum static

Flexible and dynamic curriculum shaped by local context

Hierarchical relationship between Peer relationship between professor and student professor and student No student input in evaluations of professors

Student input in evaluation of professors

No regular evaluation mechanism for courses

Routine evaluation of courses

Limited concern or awareness of gender issues

Gender sensitivity

Uniform view of students

Cross-cultural sensitivity, especially in international settings

No policy on ethics

Increased awareness of ethics in the classroom and in academe

Limited relationship with nonacademic bodies outside of the institution

Increasing collaboration and relationship building outside of institution, with governments, policy-makers, industry, community, etc.

Ivory tower view of academic institutions

Increasing concern for employment-related application of learning

*Inspired in part by the Working Paper #11: Globalization and 21st Century Competencies: Challenges for North American Higher Education by Fantini, Alvino, Arias-Galicia, Fernando and Guay, Daniel, 2001.

The significance of this approach • The method is welcomed by professors and students • The method enhances capacity and confidence among professors • The method is effecting change, values • The impact of which is immeasurable but the roots are potentially deep and far reaching

Conclusion • Not sure how unique this packaging of features really is?

• Features of the approach are definitely not unique (student-centered, student input in evaluation, etc.)

• How does this approach compare?

• What other features are found in your training projects, that we might want to consider?

Comparison of Approaches to the Enhancement of Research Capacity Carol Priestley

This presentation includes: Background to present research Preliminary findings Examples Issues arising Conclusions

Research Capacity defined as the empowerment of partners to:

• • • • •

Formulate research agendas Use participatory research methodologies Administer and manage research projects Network with colleagues Disseminate research results

Funders to research • • • • • • •

Bilateral programmes e.g. ENRECA, NUFU, Sida ‘Coordinating’ bodies e.g KFPE, NUFFIC, RING Foundations e.g. Ford, Rockefeller Multilateral programmes e.g. CGIAR NGOs – international, regional & national Research bodies – e.g. SSRC UN bodies e.g. FAO, WHO

Objectives of support • National and/or institutional building • Human resource development • Resource development • Building competencies

For example, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Goal: fostering closer integration of development research, development assistance policy and practical cooperation in the field of development assistance Sub goals: • The enhancement and maintenance of research capacity in developing countries of direct relevance to their development.

• The enhancement and maintenance of research capacity in Denmark of direct relevance to the development of developing countries and assistance cooperation.

• The provision of technical know-how and other expertise for solving operational problems.

• The provision of knowledge for use in developing assistance policy and assistance strategy.

• The procurement of new knowledge through research conducted at Danish and international research institutions and at institutions in developing countries.

More specifically, “Projects for enhancing research capacity in developing countries (projects on ENhancement of REsearch CApacity, ENRECA), are aiming to enhance sustainable research capacity in developing countries at selected cooperating research institutions by strengthening both human resources and the institutional capacity".

Multi-annual Multidisciplinary Research Programmes (MMRP) • To provide greater opportunities for research that is relevant to local development problems • To ensure that the research findings are disseminated and used • To strengthen the capacity of local researchers and institutes in the South

NUFU Goal: to contribute towards building up expertise in developing countries through research and educational cooperation in a reciprocal and equal partnership between university and research institutions in Norway and the developing countries.

Issues arising • Capacity building National, Institutional, Individual • Ownership and governance • Relationship between research support programmes and bi-lateral sectoral support • Funder coordination • Sustainability

National capacity • A minimal critical mass of research capacity at the individual, institutional and sectoral levels needs be present before national research bodies can play a significant role, and countries must have expressed a desire for national research policy

Institutional capacity • Institutional Strategic Plans must be in place and where possible these should be backed by Cooperation Framework Agreements • The institute should coordinate external funding to maximise impact

Individual research project capacity • Support to individual projects should be undertaken within faculty and institutional frameworks for research • Research topics must be of national relevance • Partnerships/link arrangements help to ensure scientific quality

Research networks • Impressions suggest that agencies who support research networks meet many of their objectives, but regrettably sustainability is often in question and many networks have a short life

Relationship between research support programmes and bi-lateral sectoral support All funders acknowledge that they should make, and many have moved towards, closer links with the sector departments or desks, and additionally become more aware of support to research given directly by their embassies in country

Ownership & Governance • A gradual transfer of funds and management responsibility to national or institution level seems to work best • insisting on autonomy is not without problems • management and administrative procedures often work against in-country ownership • all avenues should be explored to ensure equality in partnership, and Southern ownership in priority setting.

Coordination of support In the South, the responsibility for coordination lies at institution [and/or national] level Within the funding community, • national and international cooperation and coordination to be included within agency strategies • in-country consultations, especially focussed around discussions of national and/or strategic plans • sharing information with other agencies

Sustainability Sustainability and the role of national governments • donors’ willingness to assist institutions must be matched be a national commitment • increasing democratisation of decision-making and efforts by governments

Sustainability and funding policies • Level of support should be in line with national capability to take over the programme/project • the policy framework of funding agencies is not always internally consistent • there are potential contradictions between administrative requirements of agencies and the approaches required for strengthening institutional capacity • budgetary support should not be provided if it is likely to prevent necessary organisational changes

Sustainability at the levels of projects, institutions and partnerships • stakeholders must be centrally involved in the planning, management and implementation of a project/programme • Successful implementation requires proper project planning and adequate institutional support • sustainable linkages depend on strong local infrastructure, high levels of commitment and on the availability of other sources of funding.

Conclusions Programmes have a greater chance of being effective if: • • • • •

the focus is very clear the partners have Strategic Development and Indicative Plans the partners decide the programme content the partners select their counterparts programme managers and administrators have in-depth country knowledge and familiarity with institutions • there are annual meetings with Southern partners • the sandwich model is employed for degree programmes

Programmes may be less effective if • • • • •

there is a large imbalance of funding between N&S ownership and governance remain in the North sustainability is not planned from the beginning too much bureaucracy leads to inflexibility the research findings are not published, not disseminated or accessible • the principles of networking are not understood • there is lack of collaboration with other funding partners

Finally, • strengthening research capacity continues to require a long-term approach and is contextspecific; • communication of research results is essential (and may be as, if not more, important than generation of new knowledge).

Thank you, questions please‌

Carol Priestley, Director, INASP 27 Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HU Email: inasp@inasp.info Website: http://www.inasp.info

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Strategies for Poverty Reduction. The Role of Higher Education Education - a Common Good?

Knowledge and Education in the era of GATS.

•

•

– – –

Higher Education in the Strategy for Poverty Reduction Farewell to Education as a Common Good?

Knowledge and Education in the era of GATS Programmes for Educational Partnership: Between Politics and Academic Autonomy

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Co-operation in Higher Education in Case of Crises

Co-operation in Higher Education: Visions, models and experiences. What works?

Co-operation with institutions in South • Policies and models • Views, both for North and South Educational models and co-operation in South have to be identified and ”owned” in South

”North” have to have to have policies • overall for the 90/10 perspective (Global and poverty perspective) • as part of the ordinary obligations for Universities of the North •Institutional strategy •Allocation of core resources

Strategies for Poverty Reduction.

The Role of Higher Education. MAR •

Capacity enhancement —at the – individual, – institutional, and – societal levels;

•

Science and technology— – for the knowledge needed to tackle problems of health, food security, sustainable use of the environment, among others;

•

The knowledge economy— – to integrate knowledge production, application, and dissemination;

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Productivity—and its links to prosperity.

For most of the decade of the 1990’s, the World Bank was seen as an enemy of higher education but now………..

• Now it is a new direction……..

Strategies for Poverty Reduction.

The Role of Higher Education. MAR • •

Capacity enhancement Coherence – – – – –

•

Enhancement of South institutions – – – – –

Trade policy AID policy Military programme Multilateral vs bilateral Between ministries.

Own policy Own curriculum Own perspectives But not old traditions…….

Credit for degrees ad teaching programmes • Joint degrees

•

Partnership – Institutional partnership more than individual

•

Coherence with • Multi-bilateral • Private Public

– Credit for degrees, teaching

Strategies for Poverty Reduction.

The Role of Higher Education. MAR • Capacity enhancement • Coherence – – – –

Trade policy AID policy Military programme Multilateral vs bilateral

• In Norway: – Coherence • Multi-bilateral • Private Public • Ministry of education – Context important!!

– Vs. MH,MA,MT ??

– Joint degrees

– Partnership: • credit for “Sandwich programmes” – not identified in the new reform

Strategies for Poverty Reduction.

The Role of Higher Education. BS • Norwegian strategy 1.Education strategy 2.Research strategy (1999) • Funds – NUFU – Scholarship – +..

• Incentives for partnership

• Right priority?

• Size…. Low! Like a middle level football club??

•Joint degrees.

•Credit for ”sandwich contribution”

Strategies for Poverty Reduction.

The Role of Higher Education.

• BS ”Politicians both in North and South should use their academics and research capacity in their universities in a better way”

• EØ:

Concern

– Relevance and priority for poverty problems – ”Higher education produces elite power” • Negative???

• Important to have relevant ”elite power”

Education - a Common Good?

Knowledge and Education in the era of GATS. KA

• Need intellectuals to build the society • The Universities are the lifeblood for education • All reforms has come through academics,-in particular women…

• Have to adhere to both equity and development

Education - a Common Good?

Knowledge and Education in the era of GATS. •

BBU: Change in priority for higher education – WB in writing—In reality?

– In North----- (?)

– In Norway

HOB: • Education will remain a common god,- both primary,secondary and higher education.

•This is a human right.

•Standardization of degree system •Increased mobility and interchange of modules.

•Mutual interests •GLOBAL and POVERTY PERSPECTIVES are parts of JOB no 1

Cooperation in higher education: WHAT WORKS • MU/Francophone/NUFFIC/Sweden/Canada – – – – –

Institutionalized co-operation South needs should match partnership institutionally Capacity enhancement to Donors have to harmonize all levels Strengthen knowledge sharing

• Group works…

We have not address the “big money of US” – the “green card drain” to US

Co-operation with institutions in South. Policies and models Educational models and co-operation in South have to be identified and ”owned” in South ”North” have to have to have national and institutional policies • overall for the 90/10 perspective (Global and poverty perspective) • as part of the ordinary obligations for Universities of the North •Institutional strategy •Allocation of core resources •For partnership and Networks

Co-operation with institutions in South • have to have strong national strategies and increased priorities for collaboration • have to enhance the higher learning, and research identified and institutionalized in South institutions • ICT and Virtual frames should be tools for enhancement and not control, suppression and dominance from NORTH or SOUTH • ICT should be the main tool for knowledge management and publications • GATS is problematic as it operates now

Publishing strategy • How to give credit to “South “ journals • publish in an open-access journal whenever a suitable one exists (5%) and • publish the rest of your research (95%) in a toll-access journal but also • self archive it in your own institutional Eprint Archives