1 December 2022  Issue No: 385

The government of Cameroon has started the recruitment and appointment of 573 lecturers, including academics in the diaspora, at the country’s 11 staff-starved state universities for the 2022-23 academic year. This represents the last implementation phase of a presidential promise that 2,000 teachers would be injected into the public sector.

Four universities in Africa, based in Morocco, Egypt and South Africa, are among the 250 universities that have been ranked by the Global Employability University Ranking and Survey 2022 for producing employable graduates, according to recruiters of over 800,000 young graduates in 2022-23.

Being an African scientist and researcher, Dr Susan Chomba was struck by the under-representation of African researchers, scientists and academics at COP27, the United Nations’ climate conference hosted on African soil earlier in November. She shares her insights about the event and climate science.

Community service is a critical tool for decolonising African universities and can turn universities into real partners for development, but until the obligations of this key mission are enshrined in policy or law and adequate funding is provided, it will remain largely voluntary.

A colourful, retrospective, celebratory, sometimes jarring, but pertinent coffee table book, which captures the violent intensity of the 2015 #FeesMustFall student movement that shook South Africa, has been released by the Human Sciences Research Council. #FeesMustFall was a national student-led protest movement against increases in student fees.

Stacey Francis, a 44-year-old, believes in lifelong learning. She has been a student, on and off, since she completed school. Given the pace at which the world is changing, she encourages graduates to always remain up to date in their fields of study.

Students and teachers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo can, for the first time, access a free online library after the ministry of education launched the National Digital Library in a bid to boost the availability of educational resources, books and scientific articles for teaching staff and students.

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.

It is time for international educators to own up to what economists euphemistically term the ‘externalities’ of our work, namely, lethal greenhouse gas emissions from air travel that are materially exacerbating social injustices around the world, and to take bold action to redress them.

The Sustainable Development Goals framework provides an opportunity for universities to “collaborate across differences” and represents a new “common language” for universities’ social responsibility agendas, according to key speakers participating in the University Social Responsibility Summit held from 16 to 18 November.