14 April 2022  Issue No: 355

The Association of African Universities, the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, and the Training Centre in Communication Africa will join forces to improve knowledge about open science, increase adoption levels and encourage better publishing practices at member institutions. Ultimately, policies and compliance indicators are envisaged.

A rush to medicine at the expense of other fields of study may hurt Somalia’s education sector in the long term as well as the country’s economic development. The high number of medical students and graduates has been fuelled by a combination of factors, including family pressure.

The different ways of forging knowledge and understanding issues which are being produced in response to African realities are increasingly re-influencing academic thinking in the Global North, according to Madeleine Arnot, professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge.

Getting more women into business schools – as students, lecturers or deans – requires effort, but also clearer evidence of a return on investment, something to show, beyond the (male) Nobel Prize winners and (male) unicorn founders, that having an MBA makes a tangible difference.

It was in April 2016, mid-semester of what was or was supposed to be my second semester at university when I received the news. My uncle could not afford to pay for my tuition fees any more and I had to drop out. My dream of becoming an engineer had just been shattered.

More and more Zimbabwean students are establishing tech-startups, some have gone on to win international prizes and one has received substantial seed capital from a global foundation. These are not ordinary students. They are employment creators who have used their university education as a springboard into other opportunities.

The Technological Higher Education Network South Africa or THENSA is focusing much attention on competency-based learning and teaching, student entrepreneurship and changes in the workplace, including the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. At a gathering as part of its Higher Education Reform Experts South Africa or HERESA project, these topics were explored in greater depth.

Amid efforts to anchor the One Health concept into African health systems, academics have urged universities to develop competency-based curricula to address the urgent need to improve Africa’s preparedness for pandemic outbreaks and for the emerging and re-emerging of highly infectious diseases.

The potential impact of the Ukraine conflict on Ukraine and Russia will highlight the constraints and opportunities of international student recruitment and mobility in non-Anglophone countries which have to overcome multiple challenges in order to carve out a place in the competitive market for themselves.

While the swift higher education reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is understandable, it ignores the most vulnerable and could jeopardise the foundation of international collaboration and ultimately harm individuals and institutions with little to no control over state policy-making.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hindered and in some cases reversed years of progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, universities are being encouraged to focus on forging broad partnerships as a means to effect meaningful change.