24 November 2022  Issue No: 384

As universities in Africa desperately strive to increase their output of PhD graduates to meet the needs of academia and research, some scholars are pointing out the need to rethink PhD education in order to build alternative career pathways for doctoral candidates.

President Muhammadu Buhari has yet to sign a bill aimed at tackling growing incidences of sexual harassment in Nigerian higher education institutions into law since it was passed by the Senate, the country’s upper law-making body, two-and-a-half years ago. It prescribes imprisonment of up to 14 years for any academic found guilty of sexual misconduct against students.

At a time when the scientific community has been hailed for its work in providing evidence and recommendations in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the impact of climate change on different communities, universities, as institutions, are absent in the COP27 framework and agenda.

Rhodes University in South Africa, the project leader of a European Union-funded initiative to embed the Sustainable Development Goals in higher education curricula, aims to develop a policy brief based on what has been learned from the project to contribute to capacity among academic staff as teachers.

Creating a generation of complex systems thinkers who can contend with global challenges involves equipping students with transdisciplinary competencies and expertise. A case study involving transdisciplinary graduate programmes at the University of British Columbia in Canada offers insights into how such competencies can be built.

Cancer research in Africa accounts for 7.9% of the continent’s biomedical research, five times lower than that of infectious diseases, according to a new study. Moreover, childhood cancer across Africa accounted for 1.6% of the total research output, a volume that was too small in comparison with the disease burden of cancer in African children.

Tamlyn Sasha Naidu from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, was this year’s breakthrough winner of the emerging talents at the Falling Walls Science Summit held in Berlin, Germany. Falling Walls is the unique global hub connecting science, business and society.

Figures from the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency show that only 28.2% of PhD holders in the country are women, compared with 71.8% of men. This discrepancy is alarming judged by the fact that, on lower academic qualification levels, women perform better.

Questioning the very basis of business school education and what it stands for may have to be reconsidered amid the challenges of climate change. The aspects of this are expected to be part of the agenda of the new Business Schools for Climate Leadership Africa initiative, comprising six African institutions.

The metaverse is here to stay and we cannot let learners disappear in it. By making social and emotional learning central in the metaverse, there is an opportunity to bridge the virtuality-reality divide and foster a sense of community to drive real change.

Beyond recruitment drives, equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives should enrich learners and learning, monitor quality education design, indigenise curricula, inspire leadership, assess academic impact and foster glocal community development – and there are examples from across the world to illustrate their multiple applications.

China’s Confucius Institutes have come under close scrutiny, with prominent politicians calling for all institutes at British universities to be closed, but uncertainty created by frequent changes in the UK’s prime minister means the exact nature of their fate is not yet sealed.