Europe in dialogue with South Africa, eyeing BRICS

A high-level policy dialogue in Brussels last month showed that there is both the will and the potential for much closer cooperation between European Union and South African higher education.

The meeting ended with agreements in five areas – the rationale for internationalisation, internationalisation at home, quality and quality assurance, open educational resources, and tools and instruments for cooperation.

The meeting was part of a series of events where EU officials discuss the considerable number of new developments in European higher education internationalisation with key international partners.

Most striking about this particular dialogue was the similarity of the vocabulary and issues in South Africa and the European Union. This bodes very well indeed for future cooperation, even if the most acute priorities for the two partners are still quite different.

Firoz Patel, deputy director general in the South African Department of Higher Education and Training, had no doubt about the area with the greatest potential for cooperation with the EU.

“Quality,” he said, explaining that he hoped for a running programme where the yet undefined three dialogues per year between 2014 and 2016 would prioritise this issue.

South Africa’s challenges

South Africa struggles with quality assurance on a rather unique scale. Higher education has exploded in recent years. Just in the last months, two new universities have been launched: Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape and the new University of Mpumalanga.

But higher education must expand even more if it is to accommodate some of the 3.5 million young people between ages 15 and 24 who are neither in education nor employed.

In fact, the pressure is not solely on higher education, because out of the same age group only two million are in further and higher education combined.

Skyrocketing student numbers put a severe strain on the quality of higher education in the country, which was extremely elitist until just two decades ago. A new generation of teachers and researchers is urgently needed.

The Brussels meeting resulted in a series of concrete ideas for further action, most notably the identification of a set of objectives for higher education from the South African National Development Plan for which convergence can be found with EU agendas. From these, the delegations agreed to develop appropriate initiatives to take forward jointly.

The BRICS

As University World News reported, the European Commission also recently held a high level dialogue meeting in Brazil. The occurrence of two high level meetings with two of the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – countries within a month of each other begs the obvious question of whether this is coincidental or part of a policy.

“Well, life is never clear-cut,” said Jordi Curell, director for higher education and international affairs at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture. “But of course, the timing is not coincidental in that we have just published our policy paper on internationalisation.”

The policy paper Curell refers to is European Higher Education in the World, the final version of which was published in July 2013.

“One of the findings on which we build current activities is that we are increasingly in competition and cooperation with these countries. As a whole, the European Union is still a very attractive place to study, but the international higher education landscape is changing, not least in these countries. It is imperative that we interact with them.

“We are not prioritising the BRICS countries but we follow EU external policies and just like Eastern Europe and the Southern Mediterranean, the BRICS countries are important EU partners in a global perspective.”

But the EU neighbours and to some extent Russia have been the main targets of EU external cooperation in education for more than two decades. The BRICS countries have not.

So yes, although Curell cannot say it in so many words, high-level meetings with Brazil, South Africa, India and China are part of a more recent, targeted effort towards what European Higher Education in the World refers to as ‘emerging or industrialised countries’.

Different countries, different approaches

That said, the approach to these countries cannot be generalised as they all face distinct, often significant, challenges.

The EU has only recently started to fund capacity building in and mobility with South Africa as the country seeks to build up the capacity of its universities, taking into account the different social and economic characteristics of their student populations. Access, equity and quality are high on the agenda here.

One important aim is to try to develop EU mobility programmes so that they are compatible with the systems of these countries, in part because higher education has become a global affair but just as much because higher education has become a global business, most of whose consumers are precisely in these countries and many of whose ‘exporters’ are based in the EU.

There may be a trend, but there is no blueprint for cooperation. Each relationship is developed on its own merits and opportunities.

“With China we have a high level strategic partnership that originally rested on two pillars: trade, and democracy and human rights. Recently, what we call people-to-people dialogue was added to this,” said Curell.

In European Commission jargon this is referred to as the HPPD pillar: H(igh level) P(eople) to P(eople) D(ialogue).

“In practice this concentrates on education issues. It has received the same status as the other two pillars. In theory, this represents a boost to education cooperation with China, but we have limited means. We had some high level summits with China and we have established a higher education standing platform.

“We plan to have another dialogue next year, with the commissioner participating. The practical activities are part of a rolling programme. Some examples are a pilot action on language training for Chinese teachers and a Tuning study with China.”

In India, which the European Commission’s Director General for Education and Culture Jan Truszczynski recently visited, the programme is slightly different. Although a joint declaration has been signed here too, it covers not just education but also culture and multilingualism.

EU-South Africa cooperation

The precise modes of cooperation with South Africa will be defined early next year. What is certain is that there will be a workshop on FET (further education and training) in 2014, focusing on college teacher and lecturer professionalism. It will be based on two new studies.

A 2015 workshop will focus on the relationship between higher education and FET in the knowledge triangle, one of the hobby horses of the commission at the moment, that the new KICs also bear testimony to.

One seminar will deal with multilingualism, and annual reviews will map South African participation in EU programmes. Up to three further dialogues will be held on topics that have come out of the meeting in Brussels.

Relations with the whole of the African continent will hit the agendas again at the EU-Africa Summit in Brussels in April 2014.