The proliferation of new threats against academic and intellectual freedoms across Africa has emanated from the deepening of neoliberal cultures in society and in higher education institutions. Against this backdrop, there is an urgent need for a drive to safeguard these freedoms across Africa.

Egypt has launched a Young Researchers Academy to nurture young talent and equip them with the skills that are necessary to drive the country’s scientific research and technological advancements. The academy aims to train up to 1,500 researchers from various Egyptian universities and institutes.

In Uganda, half the population is under the age of 18, while unemployment rates are sky high. But the government’s ‘Skilling Uganda’ programme has been shifting the focus to practical skills, revitalising technical and vocational education and training institutions across the country.

Al-Azhar University in Egypt has recently awarded degrees to deceased students. When universities award posthumous degrees, they have to follow institutional guidelines that should capture a balance between compassion and academic standards – and to prevent academic procedures from turning into memorial services, experts have said.

African universities are caught in a colonial and neoliberal trap that they must escape in order to provide “authentic learning” – even though this will likely take decades, says Fikile Vilakazi, the director of the gender equity unit at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

The geosciences are enhancing Africa’s status and strategic geopolitical importance in the just energy transition as the continent’s abundant natural resources attract increasing attention. Universities in Africa are beginning to pay greater attention to studies in this discipline as student numbers are low in some regions.

The challenging task of establishing a new university can be achieved only by communicating a clear purpose for the institution and continuously engaging the staff to ensure their effective participation in pursuit of this, says Professor Thoko Mayekiso, vice-chancellor of the University of Mpumalanga in South Africa.

Funding for mid-career researchers in South African universities is declining, even though scientific progress could be accelerated by allocating adequate financial resources to this category of research cadres. Now, their career development is on the line.

Several Nigerian students who have voiced their dissatisfaction about their universities and political leaders on social media have faced disciplinary action and intimidation – actions that human rights activists believe are undermining freedom of expression in Nigeria. Some have not been able to complete their studies.

On 9 April, the Great Zimbabwe University suspended a student for two semesters for posting “disparaging remarks” against the university management, and allegedly inciting other students on a WhatsApp group. He is part of a growing list of students who have been disciplined for activism.

More conservation scholars and practitioners must be trained urgently to combat the loss of biodiversity in Africa if the Convention on Biological Diversity’s ambitious ‘30x30’ goal is to be met. The aim is to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.

African researchers are at a high risk of being exploited by the global network of predatory publishers who exploit the increasing pressure on career academics to ‘publish or perish’ to make money for themselves.

The only way to chart a path for Africa’s rise out of poverty over the next 100 years is by adopting a form of development which begins to take seriously humans’ relationship with nature, according to Cameroonian public intellectual Achille Mbembe.

Most of Nigeria’s government-funded university libraries are poorly equipped, leaving students without access to modern books, journals and up-to-date digital resources. Adequate funding, curriculum reform and collaboration between the government, educational institutions and the private sector could help to deal with the problem.

Is silence in the face of global injustice in the best interests of South African universities? That is one of the questions about the role of universities in geopolitics that academics have been engaging with in the latest edition of the South African Journal of Science.

Universities in South Africa should not be neutral in responding to geopolitical conflicts as the country’s history is replete with ideologies of racism, colonialism and apartheid. Instead, they should question the cost of silence, write two scholars in the South African Journal of Science.

A debate has been raging in the South African higher education sector regarding how academics should engage with or respond to global geopolitical conflicts, such as the war in the Middle East, as well as whether universities should issue statements or pass resolutions on pressing matters of a political nature when there is no consensus among staff and students.

The head of the Technological Higher Education Network South Africa, or THENSA, Professor Henk de Jager, has high hopes about changing the gloomy narrative around unemployment in the Southern African Development Community region with the help of the new University-Industry Co-Creation project.

With a policy that allows students to operate businesses on campus and to employ students to run them and funding support to grow these businesses, Nelson Mandela University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province is driving entrepreneurial development and social innovation.

Universities must abandon old-fashioned ideas about their roles and the kinds of qualifications they offer if they are to meet student needs and serve the public good, says Peter Wells, the head of education at UNESCO’s regional office for Southern Africa.

Were the proliferation of private universities and the aggressive marketisation of courses in public universities in Africa used as an antidote to cool off political radicalism in higher education, or were they prompted by a genuine desire to harness private resources to speed up the growth of university enrolments on the continent?

New academic reflections as part of a discourse about the crisis facing postcolonial African higher education are shedding more light on the role of political, economic and social influences on struggles and strained relations between the African ruling elites and public universities, staff unions and students.

How can barriers be broken and gender equality be accelerated in African universities? Who is responsible for women’s under-representation in leadership roles and harassment in those institutions? Who can be counted on to advocate for gender social justice and safe campuses in African universities?

A leaked memo for grant management staff of the United States government’s National Institutes of Health instructs officers to hold “all [research] awards to entities located in South Africa”. Some experts estimate that as much as 70% of South Africa’s medical research is funded through the National Institutes of Health.

Africa’s development depends on the higher education sector embracing change and producing leaders capable of addressing the complex governance and technological issues that will determine the continent’s future, says Patrick Awuah, the founder of Ghana’s first private university.

When Zvikomborero Mawodza finished her O-levels in Zimbabwe, there was no money for her to go to advanced secondary school, let alone university. But, instead of seeing this as a lost opportunity to attain a degree, Mawodza calls it “a blessing in disguise”.

The free senior high school programme former president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo introduced in 2017 has turned into a curse for Ghana’s tertiary education sector. The programme churns out more graduates than the universities can accommodate and contributes to unemployment.

Abigarl Ndudzo was in secondary school when a new world opened before her eyes – that of micro-organisms she could see only through the lens of a microscope. There and then, science became her passion, and, at the end of 2024, this passion led to an AGNES-Bayer grant.

Angolan higher education institutions and students are opposing the suspension of government recognition of 83 higher education health courses following a 2024 review, which left little time for universities and colleges to resolve identified problems.

For a decade, clinical psychologist Professor Thoko Mayekiso has been at the helm of the University of Mpumalanga, the first tertiary institution established in democratic South Africa. The vice-chancellor speaks about leadership, diversity in higher education as well as the next chapter of her life.

South Africa’s science policy documents reveal at least four key priorities for national research and development funding. But, to assess the impact of these policies, a more detailed characterisation of research in the country is needed – one that also considers the social impact of science.

At a time when most of his peers are struggling to get into junior high or senior high school, 13-year-old Melchizedek Adio Baafawiise has become one of the youngest undergraduates to be admitted to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, where he studies physics.

The scheduled abolition of Mozambique’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education and the country’s Secretariat of State for Professional Technical Education has created uncertainty about the future of the country’s higher education sector. However, some hope this will bring back autonomy to universities.

Universities in Africa should be prioritising the production of skilled graduates rather than knowledge, which they can access through other means, says Ghanaian entrepreneur Fred Swaniker, who is the founder and chief executive of a network of higher education institutions called the African Leadership Group.

Several regional initiatives allied with increasing digitalisation have led to greater student and graduate mobility and boosted knowledge production across East Africa, says Dr James Jowi, the deputy executive secretary of the East African Kiswahili Commission.

The African Union has named 2025 the Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations. It gives momentum to existing initiatives focusing on slavery. University World News spoke to Dr José Lingna Nafafé about one such project.

Benin scientist Loukaiya Zorobouragui grew up herding cattle with her young brother – an experience which pushed her to become a cattle breeder and a researcher who uses bioinformatics and molecular genetics to delve into animals’ genetic potential to improve their resilience to climate change.

Lesotho students are pushing the government of their mountain kingdom to lower the retirement age from 60 to 55, so that graduates have a better chance of professional success. The focus of the students is access to well-paying public-sector jobs.

Contestation over the nature of knowledge is mounting as new universities and think tanks challenge traditional approaches to higher education across Africa, says Professor Tade Aina, senior director of the higher education and research in Africa programme at the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Ghanaian marine biologist Juliet Ama Mawusi Edekor made the painful decision to live in a city far away from her friends and family as she deemed them a distraction. They believed that science was not a career a woman should pursue.

When Ajisafe Sodiq enrolled at the Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto in 2020, frustration over wasting time, money and energy waiting for commercial buses or taxis to get essentials off-campus became a problem he just had to solve. Two years later, his delivery initiative combats students’ stress.

Amid Kenya’s highest-ever youth unemployment rate in history, students are turning to social media platforms to generate an income. YouTube and Facebook are still at the top of the list, but the opportunities TikTok offers are now giving unemployed graduates hope for the future.

African universities should decolonise through human and epistemic diversity and internationalisation rather than by adopting a parochial ‘nativism’ and by retreating into epistemic enclaves separate from the rest of the world, says Dr William Mpofu, a researcher at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Artificial intelligence tools are providing tertiary-educated youth in Africa with new mechanisms to express their political and social viewpoints without having to demonstrate with placards in the streets – a scenario that shows that voices of dissent on the continent are rapidly shifting to digital platforms.

Nigerian academics must restore the intellectual integrity of the country’s academic institutions. They should also prioritise their roles as agents of progress, according to Tanure Ojaide, the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the United States.

Dr Caroline Rosemyya Kwawu is working to identify materials that are cheap and stable to efficiently store energy from the sun. Through the process of electrolysis, such materials can help convert carbon dioxide, the main gas responsible for global warming, into long-chain hydrocarbons, liquid fuels, for transportation and electrification.

The apprehension in Dr Abdul Muminu Isah’s voice was palpable as he recounted the impact of the United States foreign aid freeze on his team’s HIV/AIDS research projects. The principal investigator at the Person-Centred HIV Research Team at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Isah coordinates a number of HIV research programmes that are now in jeopardy.

Africa’s scientific landscape faces twin challenges: low research output and limited participation in global scientific discourse. This hinders the continent’s ability to respond to its ‘wicked problems’ and contribute to global knowledge and sustainability. The pioneering Future Africa initiative is taking up the challenge.

Universities should move from producing graduates who know how to work the system and, instead, embrace new forms of thinking that promote social justice, according to Shanen Ganapathee, a former member of the faculty at the African Leadership University in Kigali, Rwanda.

Growing up in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Sambatriniaina Rajohnson loved watching films depicting real or imaginary science and technology stories. When astrophysics was introduced at the University of Antananarivo, she signed up and, today, she is an astronomer, working to map and uncover obscured galaxies.

Zimbabwean student Natasha Chipudya quit law studies at the church-run Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University after attending lectures for fewer than three months as she felt that the university’s dress code oppressed women. Student leaders said there was a need for dialogue about these concerns.

Yvonne Oyieke, the executive director of the Utu Wetu Trust, an organisation that promotes human rights and state accountability for sexual and gender-based violence, spoke to University World News about dress codes in higher education spaces, personal freedom and gender equality.

At the beginning of 2024, African leaders adopted education as a continental priority under the theme, ‘Educate an African fit for the 21st century: Building resilient education systems for increased access to inclusive, lifelong, quality, and relevant learning in Africa’.

Ugandan national Dr Irene Nandutu, one of the 30 African recipients of the 2024 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Young Talents Sub-Saharan Africa Awards, overcame numerous childhood challenges. She persevered, and is now researching the role of artificial intelligence in early childhood neurological development.

Beneficiaries of one of the largest scholarship programmes in agriculture education in Africa are turning into successful entrepreneurs, overcoming challenges and learning vital lessons to create employment for themselves and others. About a quarter of its alumni are engaged in businesses.

African universities are increasingly showing a keen interest in innovative governance, internationalisation and collaboration, and are investing resources in technology to enhance teaching, learning and research, says Professor Ernest Aryeetey, the former secretary-general of the African Research Universities Alliance.

African universities should adopt student-centred institutional cultures and modes of teaching in a bid to produce a cadre of ‘organic intellectuals’ who can change the ways in which society thinks about itself, according to Yunus Ballim, the founding vice-chancellor of Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley, South Africa.

Dr Josephine Aikpitanyi is on a mission to empower African women to take control of their own health. This Nigerian postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain in Belgium is challenging traditional norms and revolutionising the way we think about maternal healthcare by exploring the link between personality traits and healthcare choices.

The legacy of South Africa’s first post-apartheid minister of education, Professor Sibusiso Bengu, includes the establishment of the foundation for a unified system with a strong emphasis on higher education. The former teacher, university vice-chancellor and ambassador passed away on 30 December 2024.