22 September 2019  Issue No: 250

To leverage the multiplier effects of partnerships to achieve development goals in Africa, governments, higher education and the private sector each have discernible but interrelated roles to play.

As Nigeria prepares to force lecturers to do industrial attachments, it is clear that the value of degrees is falling under closer scrutiny. To boost quality, it is important to take a broader look at how higher education is serving the interests of employers and driving innovation.

South Africa’s Higher Education Science and Technology Minister Blade Nzimande has been urged by the country’s vice-chancellors to keep the Budget vote for the recently merged higher education, and science and technology ministries separate to avoid the latter being gobbled up by the former.

Higher education stakeholders have welcomed a set of new Japanese initiatives aimed at promoting research and development capacity in Africa as well as entrepreneurship and innovation skills among African students.

When I first arrived in South Africa from Egypt, I had a desire to study theoretical physics and become a motivational speaker. I eventually achieved my academic goal in a journey that was filled with both beauty and days of uncertainty, fear and depression. Fortunately, I had a few tools that helped me along the way.

For online education to be successful there has to be commitment and support by governments, institutions, academics and learners. An absolute necessity is providing quality education. That means having good staff and resources, supportive leadership and providing continuous quality assurance.

Blockchain has been proposed as a technology to revolutionise everything from farming to pharmaceuticals and to create digital data depositories for education. Now it seems it may become a useful tool for regional integration of international education in the ASEAN region.

The differences between how Queen’s University, Ontario, dealt with its past history of racial discrimination and the raucous debates that have occurred across the United States about, for example, the renaming of the residential college named after John C Calhoun at Yale University, are instructive.