17 August 2023  Issue No: 416

As the fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces enters its fourth month, the detention of citizens has raised concern, while appeals have also been made to the International Labour Organization to help secure the payment of workers, including academics, who have gone without salaries since April.

More than 100 postgraduate students who failed to return to Nigeria after completing their studies could be repatriated or forced to pay back government scholarships. Moreover, the future of the scholarship programme, which has benefitted thousands of students, hangs in the balance due to alleged abuse.

An emerging global movement to transform engineering education, aimed at achieving greater peace, sustainability and resilience, draws on many disciplines as well as engineering’s own rich toolbox to find new ways to solve the pressing problems that increasingly confront our planet.

Anti-black African xenophobia, which spills over into physical threats, is a pressing issue in South Africa – from its streets to its universities. Yet foreign academics, university administrators and teachers contribute directly to local higher education institutions that would be much poorer without them.

The Future Professors Programme is a national, collaborative initiative with the goal of developing excellence and leadership in a select pool of academic staff, and one of the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s staff development programmes. Two fellows of the programme share their experience of participating in the programme.

Zimbabwean student Muongeni Tamara Manda has made history as the only woman from Africa to make it to the global top 30 International Astronautical Federation emerging young space leaders. She is studying geoinformatics and environmental conservation at Zimbabwe’s Chinhoyi University of Technology.

There is widespread agreement that African universities need to produce more PhDs in order to fast track their countries’ socio-economic development, but what is conspicuously absent in the debate is how PhDs should be produced in order to achieve the expected outcomes.

AI technology is here to stay, and it is worth higher education leaders’ time to think about how to engage with it to protect student privacy, enhance the student experience and help all stakeholders prepare for a future of working with powerful technology.

A new report on undocumented students, which acknowledges their potential value to the United States, makes a strong case for legislation that will allow them to work and study without fear of deportation and create a path to permanent residency and citizenship.