2 February 2023  Issue No: 391

Only 3.3% of nearly a million school-leavers in Ethiopia passed their final examinations with 50%. The shocking result is the outcome of two decades of challenges and will affect the intake in public and private higher education institutions. It has now prompted Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to devise a national strategy in a bid to halt the decay.

Kenya is seeing the highest number of prospective university students in seven years in what could be a major boom for cash-strapped universities, or what could precipitate a crisis for places. In the meantime, the senate committee on education promised to probe the ‘unusual’ improvement in performance in some schools.

Changes in the seasonal temperature and floods in Yaoundé, Cameroon's capital, have made climate change tangible on the campus of the University of Yaoundé 1. It has been affecting anything from students’ dress code to the cost of food, and has reminded researchers of the role they have to play in addressing the crisis.

Ahead of a ground-breaking summit on partnerships at the University of Pretoria’s Future Africa campus, the head of research capacity development at the University of Pretoria, Dr Rakeshnie Ramoutar-Prieschl, said international collaboration is increasingly viewed as the key to successful development research and to address shared global challenges.

A new definition of higher education internationalisation can create an opportunity for South Africa to become an ‘active and self-determined’ contributor and partner in the global field of internationalisation of higher education instead of merely replicating dominant concepts and definitions from the Global North.

Questions have been raised about what the South African Ministry of Higher Education and Training has done to tackle problems at ‘historically black’ universities such as the University of Fort Hare. One suggestion is that the ministry must declare the names of companies that are providing services to universities.

A recent study highlights the extent to which women have been under-represented on editorial boards of scientific journals over the past five decades and in almost all fields – and how common it is for editors to self-publish their papers in their own journals.

With a new grant from Global Affairs Canada, Context Matters is set to begin its second half-decade of studying literacy in Africa. Context Matters is a programme created by CODE, a Canadian NGO that focuses on early-grade literacy in Africa with special concern for girls’ literacy and gender equality.

Universities will continue to play a significant role in addressing the impact of climate change, promoting sustainability and providing roadmaps towards mitigation and adaptation methods during 2023. Climatologists in Africa have drawn up their lists of priorities, given the region’s unique challenges.

The need to achieve greater inclusion in higher education responds to a strong social justice imperative, and higher education systems in which opportunities are equally distributed have become the basis for sustainable development and for the construction of fair and democratic societies.

Quality assurance in the last 25 years has contributed relatively little to solving the structural problems of the higher education sector and the challenges facing the evolution of the sector in Latin America, as evidenced by its minimal competitive participation at the global level.

Just as United Kingdom universities celebrated a continuing surge in international student numbers, there was speculation in the national media of infighting between government departments over proposals to reduce the time foreign students can stay in the country to look for work after graduating.