24 February 2022  Issue No: 348

As part of the series of thought leader engagements on the reimagining of higher education in Africa, philosopher Mogobe Ramose suggests the word ‘university’ should be replaced with ‘pluriversity’ – a site where a plurality of knowledge co-exists, thus challenging the problematic fragmentation of knowledge.

Technical and vocational education and training or TVET institutions in East Africa supported by the World Bank-funded East African Skills for Transformation and Regional Integration Project have recorded a fourfold increase in student enrolment over the past two-and-a-half years. Student enrolment in 16 regional flagship institutes was shown to be more than 100% higher than the overall annual target.

Five African countries are working with Egypt to launch a pan-African satellite project dubbed the African Development Satellite Initiative or AfDev-Sat to study the impact of climate change across Africa and what space technology can offer in this area. Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and Sudan are involved.

Transformation inputs, outputs and accountability measures are necessary conditions for optimising a university’s change orientations. So are policies, vision-building and mission statements. And lodging transformation, via the generation of inclusive and cohesive collaboration cultures, among diverse publics is the strategic challenge of a university.

Only one in five researchers worldwide are repeat authors. What can early career researchers do to improve their chances of getting published? An expert from Taylor and Francis shares her advice on which academic journals to choose or avoid and how best to prepare a manuscript.

She started school at the age of four and, at the age of 11, a lesson on astronauts sparked a lifelong love for and dance with the sciences. Senamile Masango started to think about her goals after the geography teacher said that no African had ever been to space.

Despite numerous challenges, Africa has made notable progress in the production of scientific knowledge in the past two decades, with a total share of 7.6% of contributions to the world of science and one-third of all international publications in tropical medicine.

Is China’s approach to higher education unique or can previous understandings of wider East Asian development help us to interpret – but not fully explain – the situation of China and its higher education sector?

Recent changes in quality assurance legislation in Chile and Mexico show the importance of including all stakeholders in discussions. But more needs to be done to put institutions at the heart of quality assurance and to incentivise them to make improvements.

Dutch universities are calling on the government to cap the number of international students, to maintain the quality of degree programmes in the face of rapidly rising numbers of students from abroad and stagnant funding. So says Drs Pieter Duisenberg, president of the Association of Universities of the Netherlands.