1 June 2023  Issue No: 408

Universities and research organisations across Africa and Europe have called for a new science, technology and innovation framework for cooperation between the two continents to drive sustainable development. They say it should be grounded in academic excellence, sustainability, capacity building and scalability.

Private higher education institutions have a vital role to play in the development of Africa but, in order to be sustainable, they need to be successful, innovative and impactful. This was a core message conveyed at the third annual academic summit of the Honoris United Universities network in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Rift Valley Institute of Science and Technology in Kenya has been integrating the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals into its daily activities to encourage sustainable agriculture, the use of renewable energy and climate change mitigation. Its efforts have been recognised globally.

The South African higher education sector is highly unlikely to achieve its target of 75% of scholars across all 26 public universities having a PhD by 2030 at the current rates of growth, say scientometric researchers. However, some fields have surpassed the target.

Artificial intelligence and chatbots like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. In the higher education environment, many students find them useful to do research and write essays, but they also warn that awareness of proper use is crucial to combat cheating.

African countries have been urged to develop new universities that are entrepreneurial from the outset to counter challenges posed by unemployment, hunger and the vulnerabilities of health risks and climate change as well as competition for scarce natural resources, according to the Economic Commission for Africa.

Two centuries ago, John Newman argued that a university is there to provide ‘valuable’, rather than ‘useful’, knowledge. University discourse has evolved since then, but ‘valuable’ can be interpreted in contemporary terms as ‘responsible’ and that is what we seek: a responsible international university.

Publicly funded research outputs should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls, say European scientific community leaders who welcomed a recent 20-point plan agreed by the Council of the European Union to encourage open science.