6 May 2021  Issue No: 312

The COVID-19 crisis in India has put the African higher education community in the country on high alert and has brought into sharp focus the response of Indian universities to protect their international students and lecturers.

An overwhelming number of prospective international students from African countries find universities in the United Kingdom more appealing than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a massive online survey conducted early this year. Students are attracted by the availability of vaccines and by contact lessons, which, according to the survey, 71% of all respondents preferred to studying remotely.

As Rwandans remember the 100 days of the 1994 genocide, academics are reflecting on the role that their peers played in planning and fuelling the violence. But, more importantly, what universities and academics can do to teach a younger generation about history, ideology and discrimination. More research about the genocide is necessary as well as a social contract, in which higher education should participate.

Tshwane University of Technology’s first black female executive dean for the faculty of engineering and the built environment, Dr Mukondeleli Grace Kanakana-Katumba, intends to implement sweeping changes to position the faculty as South Africa’s leading school of engineering. Committed to youth empowerment, Kanakana-Katumba’s priorities for the next five years include a strong focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Relations with China have become strained due to increasing worries about China’s actions with regard to human rights and academic freedom, but engagement and collaboration in the academic and scientific research spheres to as great an extent as possible remain in everyone’s interest.

Undervaluing doctoral education by restricting support for PhD students and programmes due to COVID-19 resource losses risks critical damage to higher education and human and economic development – and may shift global talent flows in the immediate future, and potentially in the long run.

University and college leaders in the United States have welcomed President Joe Biden’s ‘bold’ proposal to provide two free years of community college education to all Americans and substantially increase grant support for disadvantaged students, “so that every student has the ability to obtain a degree or certificate”.