20 January 2022  Issue No: 343

Eleven African countries have been included in a list of 21 countries whose governments deliberately shut down internet access for their citizens in the course of 2021 – a move that undermined higher education as institutions, students and staff battled to continue working online during COVID-19.

The move by Rwanda’s Higher Education Council to withdraw recognition for PhD degrees obtained from the United States-based Atlantic International University because the programmes have allegedly not been accredited has angered alumni and the academic sector affected by the decision.

As part of Rwanda’s ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change, higher education and environmental partners in the country have joined forces and called on researchers to come up with proposals that could inform policy decisions about long-term climate change adaptation.

Strong personal brands usually lead to stronger corporate brands so that, as academics build their personal brands, the institutional brands they represent ultimately become stronger as well. Academics could start building their brands by choosing the specialist fields they want to be known in.

The allure of easy money and celebrity status on social media may be one of the reasons why younger people are unwilling to become active in politics in countries like Nigeria. Efforts by the government and civil society to encourage political involvement have also not yielded much success.

It may be hard to know exactly how many students in universities in Sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in excessive drinking of alcohol, but academic researchers are almost all in agreement that heavy consumption of alcohol among university students in the region is rising rapidly.

The COVID pandemic has accelerated discussions about the future of international education. A new ‘curate-flip-facilitate’ model involving a semester online using a curriculum that is created internationally and enriching facilitated international student discussions could provide an innovative, more accessible experience.

New regulations regarding off-campus education and training institutions herald the continuation of China’s trend towards a mixed economy or a ‘free market’ under which capitalism is closely supervised by the government, ie by the ruling Communist Party.

The hopes of hundreds of thousands of international students for a return to China by February – having been shut out since March 2020 – are now receding, with major outbreaks of COVID-19 in Chinese cities, fuelled by the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.