Universities across Africa are running out of academics. The scale of the crisis and reasons for it differ between countries but all are affected and one thing is certain, says Professor Goolam Mohamedbhai, Secretary-General of the Association of African Universities - the continent must "think outside the box" if it is to succeed in developing a new generation of scholars.

Africa's academic crisis is rooted in its turbulent history and exacerbated by lack of resources and global forces, explained Mohamedbhai at a University Leaders' Forum in Accra, Ghana, last month. The Association of African Universities co-hosted the Forum, on developing the next generation of academics, with the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa.

Most African universities were set up after from the 1960s, carbon copies of institutions in the north and most of them in cities. Political persecution of universities by dictatorial states in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with rapid growth in demand for higher education and World Bank policies that shifted loan funds to primary education.

The result was enormous pressures on increasingly dilapidated institutions with ever-more students and ever-fewer resources, the mass exodus of academics and young graduates to better jobs and lives oversees, and dismally low levels of research.

"A paradox is that despite doubling and then trebling students numbers, African higher education still has the lowest enrolments in the world - but sends the most students to the north," Mohamedbhai told University World News. For instance, more than 13,000 African students were on postgraduate programmes in the UK in 2003-04 - and African students comprised the second highest number of international students outside the European Union.

Overseas training has contributed significantly to the educational levels of African scholars. But in a Regional Report on Sub-Saharan Africa published by Unesco last January, Professor Johann Mouton of South Africa's Stellenbosch University argued that the usefulness of acquired knowledge to African research and innovation systems as been questioned.

"And at times such overseas training has also served as a conduit for the migration of the scientific workforce, particularly in many developing countries, weakening the already fragile knowledge base."

Africa's brain drain figures are shocking. The Research and Development Forum for Science-led Development in Africa has calculated that up to 30% of African scientists are lost to the brain drain. According to Mouton, "it has been estimated that there are more African scientists and engineers working in the US than in the whole of Africa".

A 2006 United Nations report on International Migration revealed that around half of highly-educated Ghanians had migrated, and that between 33% and 55% of highly educated people from Angola, Burundi, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Tanzania lived in wealthy countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

A recent study by the World Bank, Accelerating Catch-up - Tertiary education for growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, outlined a range of other problems that have fuelled a staffing crisis that has resulted in vacancy rates in university workforces often between 25% and 50%.

"Inadequate funding for research and insufficient attention to professional development has led to a crisis in academic staffing just when teachers are most needed to instruct the rising numbers of students," the report said. "A combination of inadequate salaries, heavy teaching workloads resulting from declining staff-student ratios, deficient personnel management, and lack of research opportunities makes staff retention and recruitment increasingly difficult."

Ghana currently needs more than 1,000 new lecturers, according to Professor Clifford Tagoe, vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana and a co-chair of the University Leaders' Forum..

Professor Ivan Addae-Mensah, former vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, Legon, said in a keynote address to the Forum that African higher education's fortunes had begun to improve during the 1990s, with the advent of democratic governments and a gradual change in attitude towards higher education.

African universities began to flex their muscles and demand greater government support. "Notwithstanding considerable resistance from various quarters, including politicians and students, some universities were able to push through fundamental changes that revitalised their programmes and began to make academic careers a little more attractive once again.

However, human resource development remains a major challenge. In order to meet societal demands to produce graduates, said Addae-Mensah, universities must themselves be staffed by highly-trained personnel and have the capacity to retain them.

The flight of academics from Africa lowered the qualification levels of the scholarly workforce at many African universities, which began to rely on masters graduates to teach. This, along with young academics being "saddled too early in their careers with mundane administrative responsibilities," also undermined research output.

At the University of Ghana, the percentage of teaching staff with doctorate degrees is 47% while 42% have a masters, but at many universities the figures are considerably lower. The university recently decided that only PhDs could be appointed as lecturers, in an effort to strengthen research output and postgraduate training.

Meanwhile, declining proportions of postgraduate students are shrinking the pool of potential future academics. In 2005-06, Ghana's University of Cape Coast enrolled more than 31,000 students - but only 17 were studying for doctorates and 172 for a masters, reported Professor Johann Mouton in the Unesco study.

Enrolment of postgraduate students in Ghana's universities remains extremely low. During 2007-08, only 5% of students were postgraduates - against, for instance, 33% at the University of Manchester, UK.

Also, government still finds it difficult to pay attractive salaries to lecturers, and postgraduate students are even worse off. Lack of adequate financial support and the need to take up part-time jobs, ineffective supervision, lack of facilities, bureaucratic bottlenecks that make it difficult to run programmes smoothly and a "lackadaisical approach to their research", mean that many students are in their mid-30s by the time they achieve a PhD, said Addae-Mensah.

This reduces the working and research life of an academic to just 25 years and means that pension scheme remuneration on retirement is low. No wonder, he added, that the staff pyramid at universities is skewed towards a high percentage of staff (59%) at the lecturer grade and there are an "unacceptable number of lecturers with only MPhil degrees".

"The age profile of university staff in the country is such that very soon there will have to be mass replacement of staff due to retirement." At the University of Ghana in 2007, only nine teaching and administrative staff were below 30 years and most were in their 40s or 50s.

If African universities are to train and retain adequate numbers of academics cost-effectively, Addae-Mensah argued, then local postgraduate research should be the route. But for this to be possible better facilities and infrastructure are needed, along with well qualified staff.

If universities in Ghana, he added, "had not taken the bold step of demanding some level of cost sharing, one can imagine what would have been the state of the universities now". In the faculty of science at the University of Ghana, this grew income ten-fold in six years.

Still, he added, much more funding is needed governments must realise that universities can only grow and improve if they are well supported financially in teaching and research." Piecemeal grants from donors were useful but "cannot provide any meaningful and permanent answer to the problems of training and retaining staff. There is no short cut to this."

* "Developing the 21st Century Scholar: What it means for Africa".


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