18 August 2022  Issue No: 370

Anger is growing over the prolonged university lecturers’ strike in Nigeria and the government’s response to it. Some stakeholders believe that, if public officials are banned from sending their children to foreign institutions, or these movements are regulated, politicians’ attention will be redirected to the crisis in public institutions.

Great care must be taken in transforming South Africa’s universities if they are not to be overtaken by ruin or subject to persistent, unresolved contestation. The task of establishing a new social pact must, of necessity, be a generational project, according to leading South African higher education policy specialist Saleem Badat.

“It is estimated that the waste sector in South Africa contributes 4.4% to the total greenhouse gas emissions. However, the nexus of waste and climate change is not explicitly quantified nor addressed in current policies at national and-or at local levels,” according to Cristina Trois, professor in environmental engineering at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

The Ethiopian government and its international partners have been implementing several initiatives to enable technical and vocational education and training, or TVET, to improve the qualifications and enhance the employment prospects of refugees in the country. But, to sustain these efforts, more needs to be done.

Teaching is seldom part of the discourse around higher education reforms in Africa, but every institution on the continent should have a framework for effective teaching. It can be conceptualised in terms of teaching quality, standards and principles and should be used to improve teaching practices.

After noticing several suicides on campus every year and little mental health support from the university authorities, a student at Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and Technology, Lancelot Matange Jnr, decided in 2019 to take action to prevent the unnecessary loss of lives. Now in his final year, Matange is using a YouTube channel to reach his peers.

A Cameroon government initiative to encourage self-employment and entrepreneurship through supporting graduates in technology start-ups is reducing unemployment and providing opportunities to create jobs and fight poverty in the university towns of Buea, Bamenda, Douala and Yaoundé. Since 2012, Cameroon’s Ministry of Higher Education has included entrepreneurship in all higher education curricula.

African students who are pursuing study opportunities in the Global North are hoping to benefit from recommendations of the Canadian Parliament regarding the recruitment and acceptance of international students, especially from Sub-Saharan Africa. Investigations have uncovered deep racial discrimination against African students who seek to study in Canada.

We hope that the implementation of a roadmap for a common higher education space in the ASEAN region can be inclusive and engaging and aligned with global consensus, and can help us to reconsider the fundamentals of higher education and ensure that it is ready for the challenges we face on all fronts.

Major regional higher education organisations in Southeast Asia have launched a roadmap to 2025 that will promote the mobility of students, faculty, researchers and interns, the development of common quality assurance benchmarks and mutual recognition of higher education credentials within the region.