25 August 2022  Issue No: 371

The governments of selected countries in Africa have been requested to provide information to Chinese authorities about international students who are enrolled in Chinese universities, signalling that China is finally prepared to welcome back students who left following the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 and have been unable to return.

Rwanda’s Higher Education Council has said that poor leadership and management of private universities affect the quality of their education and it wants more to be done to reverse the trend. This followed an inspection conducted by the council into the private higher education sector.

For too long the African woman’s story on water has been a 20-litre bucket carried on the head, transported from a dirty well to the household. As water insecurity grows, women scientists have to change this, says Professor Lindiwe Sibanda of South Africa’s University of Pretoria.

There is no end in sight to the refugee crisis, nor to the income inequality that persistently separates some social classes and populations from employment opportunities and prosperity. While the challenges can appear overwhelming, edtech holds promise in continuing to offer innovative solutions.

The West continues to dominate published scholarship about Africa. The solution is more visible research from Africa. Wits University Press has long been part of this solution but, at last count, there were only 15 active presses across the continent and some appear to be dwindling.

Forty university students worked together during two simultaneous workshops on mobile apps that will be used as tools to access information about topics such as sexual and reproductive health, mental health and career guidance. The apps are called ‘Future +’ in Zimbabwe and ‘Ownu’ in Zambia.

Experts in education have called on all universities in Rwanda to use English only as the language of instruction to help students to be more proficient when they graduate, function optimally in their workplaces and network internationally if necessary. English was adopted as the medium of teaching and learning in 2008.

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.

A comparison between the United States and Canada, two Western countries experiencing shifting discourses on international education as a result of political discord with China, provides a deeper analysis of how different governments engage in international education in the context of the new geopolitics.

Over the past 40 years, there has been a student amnesty law enacted before every election. In addition to showing the political importance of the student demographic, the law is an implicit admission of the inequalities that characterise the current higher education system.

New research that identifies four key reasons behind anti-science attitudes suggests that improving scientific literacy, the default solution for combating scepticism towards science, will only go so far towards solving the problem and a far more informed range of strategies may be needed.