5 May 2022  Issue No: 358

The African Development Bank has launched its Skills for Employability and Productivity in Africa action plan for 2022-25, to bridge Africa’s skills gap, address skills mismatch and relevance on the back of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, climate change agenda and digital transformation in the labour market.

Despite the importance of art in expressing societal consciousness and opportunities in the creative economy, fine art education in Nigeria is hamstrung by poor facilities and outdated curricula and is considered to be less lucrative than other careers once students graduate. A few institutions have started to tackle these challenges.

Researchers, innovators and policy analysts from several francophone countries in West Africa are set to benefit from the West African Women Climate Leadership Fellowship Program, which is being implemented by the African Centre of Excellence on Climate Change, Biodiversity and Sustainable Agriculture at the Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Côte d’Ivoire.

South Africa’s universities are failing to implement the “social component” of their missions effectively, says Lihle Ngcobozi, a former student activist in the nationwide #FeesMustFall protests of 2015 and now a lecturer in the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.

While Times Higher Education’s latest Impact Rankings highlight the importance of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, their real value is to privatise the capture of institutional data in order for companies to sell services to institutions keen to climb the rankings.

Many universities in least developed countries, including countries in Africa, cannot afford subscriptions for online journals and other academic publications. An open access publishing system, promoted by many as a solution to unequal access to knowledge, is not without challenges. What about selective open access?

Academic collaboration in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the post-COVID era has undergone some shifts, including in student and academic mobility. These trends were on the agenda of the Third Higher Education Forum for Africa, Asia and Latin America or HEFAALA III Symposium held from 25 to 29 April in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

There are 80 African universities in 10 countries featured in the Impact Rankings 2022 produced by Times Higher Education or THE World University Rankings. They are among 1,524 institutions from 110 countries ranked globally, based on their impacts on the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

A new accord puts climate action squarely on the international education agenda, outlining 70 concrete actions that universities can take to combat climate change at three different levels of commitment in order to make it accessible to a broad range of institutions.

The Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 serves as a handbook for the development of a high-quality digital education ecosystem which puts emphasis on co-creation, linking actors in the European Union and its member states, including teachers, citizens, businesses and various sectors of society.

Students at a top Shanghai university launched a protest against strict campus restrictions as a result of China’s zero-COVID policy, while at another university in Kunshan city, students have objected to excessive penalties which include suspension for those deemed to have breached rules.