15 October 2020  Issue No: 287

The ongoing Islamist insurgency experienced in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost province, since 2017, which has already displaced more than 250,000 people and killed more than 1,500, is damaging the operations of the region’s higher education institutions, affecting students and staff.

The new campus of the University of Cape Verde, which has cost almost US$60 million and should open in 2021, is expected to attract more national and international students and researchers to this island country, about 500km west of Senegal, in the Atlantic Ocean.

African science matters not only because African people matter but also because people everywhere in the world will thrive only if science is driven by the best possible talent and initiative of all the peoples of the world.

The world is changing so quickly that, in future, robots will be doing many of the more repetitive jobs and graduates will be seeking to do ‘human work’ or the ‘work only humans can do’, requiring empathy, human emotion, social skills, ethics and character.

Strategic planning is needed to face critical challenges. But African universities often confuse strategic planning with operational planning and, by doing so, lack clarity of purpose. So what does strategic planning mean and how can it be distinguished from other management strategies or techniques?

On 28 October, University World News, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, will be bringing together experts from new and traditional higher education providers, the tech industry and the World Bank for a webinar on: “What will employability mean in the digital age and how should higher education adapt?”

Is higher education putting too much emphasis on cleaning regimes and penalties for not social distancing to stop COVID-19 – and not enough on students’ academic progress next year and getting the right support in place early to prevent students from falling through the net?

A new benchmarking initiative should help United Kingdom universities move on from looking at international recruitment simply in terms of export value and focus on student success and the relative strengths of different UK institutions across a much wider range of comparative international higher education indicators.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented spurt in global research collaboration in the quest to find a vaccine. Over three weeks, University World News examines the phenomenon that has so far allowed for more than 200 clinical trials to be launched within months of the virus spreading across borders.