17 October 2019  Issue No: 252

The number of doctoral programmes in Ghana is rising, but there is little oversight of their quality. Mechanisms are needed to raise the quality of faculty and students and ensure programmes have a clear mission and outcomes, and are geared to career opportunities.

The African Development University in Niger's capital, Niamey, is the result of the vision of a young man, Kader Kaneye, who started dreaming 12 years ago about how to empower youth in his country through quality higher education. He will be sharing his experience at the 14th eLearning Africa conference, to be held in Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire from 23 to 25 October.

The need to augment research output in Ethiopia through the active participation of the major actors in the broader research framework is clear. Equally important is the establishment of an effective and well-coordinated system that will help build better research capacity and facilitate improved output at a national level.

Young medical doctors serving their internship in Uganda's public health system have protested against a recent change in the rotation formula which will reduce the number of disciplines in which they are trained from four to two. The unhappiness over the recent change comes on the back of long-term dissatisfaction over allowances.

A new report by a non-partisan taskforce outlines how politics is increasingly influencing government science in the United States, leading to a long list of government actions undermining legitimate science, including lies, corruption and an increase in unqualified appointees on scientific bodies.

New research shows how important it is for Australia’s government to remove the structural barriers around the temporary graduate visa and international graduates’ access to the labour market to ensure the country does not miss the potential enormous benefits of this pool of talent.

In these challenging times when the validity of science and legitimacy of universities are being increasingly questioned, refocusing on your institution’s values and upholding integrity are important strategic objectives. Sweden’s Stockholm University is piloting a Magna Charta Observatory project exploring how this can be done.