PhDs for Africa – The SANTRUST fast-track approach

Governments have grasped the fact that innovation and economic growth will be generated from growing global networks of researchers, students and institutions. It is an accepted fact that nations are increasingly dependent on higher education to produce the highly skilled labour their economies need. In Africa, however, there are significant challenges.

That is the backdrop against which SANTRUST, a South Africa-based educational trust, has developed its “pre-doctoral proposal development programme”, which over the past five years has seen 730 pre-doctoral candidates and 430 research supervisors go through a “front-loaded efficiency model” PhD preparation programme.

The trust team can, in turn, impressively boast that 94% of the PhD candidates grown by their “unique, pragmatic” fast-track model have graduated with PhDs within three to four years and 100% within five years – a zero percent drop-out rate.

The facts and figures and the programme were outlined in a paper presented at the second QS-MAPLE conference held in Durban last week by SANTRUST CEO Dr Anshu Padayachee and colleague Charmaine Williamson, in a presentation titled “The PhD Crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa: The SANTRUST model for accelerating ‘catch-up’”.

In an interview, and during the presentation, Padayachee outlined the trust’s model and the motivation and philosophy behind its development.

South Africa’s challenge was to produce 100 PhDs per one million of the population “for the country to be productive and competitive”. This was recommended by the country’s National Planning Commission in November last year, she said.

“Right now, South Africa is producing only 26 PhD graduates per million of the population. On top of this, only one third of our instructional, research and technical staff at higher education institutions possess PhD qualifications.”

University enrolment rates have leaped since 1994, the year of democracy, and the professoriate is ageing. It is estimated that by 2015 nearly half of all current professors in South Africa will have retired – “and the pipeline to fill that is growing at a far slower pace, so we could end up with fewer PhDs than we currently have”.

The trust’s work is aimed at supporting the production of more PhDs. “If you create a huge cadre of PhDs, you can then also use those PhDs to supervise masters students,” Padayachee said. It was vital that PhDs be of the highest quality, so that graduates were able to produce knowledge and so that South Africa’s PhDs were “marketable in other countries”.

The SANTRUST model has been developed over 14 years. It is currently operational in South Africa and Ethiopia, and is moving into other parts of Africa and gaining traction in other parts of the world.

It concentrates on students who have a masters degree and are set to do a PhD. The one-year programme, comprising six modules, draws for skill and expertise from a pool of 180-plus hand-picked international faculty. A unique feature is that it is a triangular model where a candidate works with a facilitator and an embedded supervisor.

The focus is on proposal development. Candidates complete the programme with a robust, defended, reviewed, ‘camera-ready’ proposal “that we are confident would be accepted at a university anywhere throughout the world,” said Padayachee.

“Proposal development is one of the biggest challenges for a PhD student. It can take, in some instances, two to three years. Once the proposal is done and assessed, our experience is that students work very much on their own and the success rate is phenomenal.”

While students essentially ‘graduate’ from SANTRUST at the end of the year with their proposal, the programme includes ongoing assessment, monitoring, support and evaluation through to PhD graduation.

Padayachee said that PhD programmes at top universities in the US, the UK and elsewhere were assessed in creating the SANTRUST model.

She pointed out that countries around the world were strategising on how to emerge from the world recession, and education – in particular higher education – was being challenged.

In the UK, “which invests enormous amounts of money in research and you can see it in their results; they’re right on top”, PhD programmes have become focused and structured. “You can see results in three to four years.”

For a long time a PhD was an elitist thing. “If you had a PhD you stood there on your pedestal and basked in the sun and spoke to nobody. That’s no more the case. The PhD is supposed to create new knowledge,” said Padayachee.

While a masters was a test of methodology, “more and more policy-makers are understanding that every time a PhD is created, every time a PhD graduate comes through a university, they have produced new knowledge to be disseminated”.

Padayachee said the trust also looked at universities across Africa in creating the programme “and found academic leaders saying something has to be done urgently and quickly if Africa is to become a player on the world stage. Africa has amazing pockets of potential, but much of this has not been realised”.

“We are living in a knowledge economy,” she said. “Institutions have to look at how they can contribute to the world knowledge economy. Everything is about knowledge and until and unless we have a sufficient number of PhDs in this country we’re not going to be able to produce knowledge needed to compete in the global market.”

Universities were being asked to deliver on various issues. “PhDs are producing information not only for industry and to build the economy of a country but also to ensure that any policies developed are evidence-based,” Padayachee explained. “Research has to feed policy. The world over, governments have realised policies based on ideologies alone will not work.”

These days, it was also imperative for higher education institutions to respond to national needs. For example, entrepreneurship and moving from a society of job seekers to job creators was contingent on “how we develop our science”.

“My personal complaint with industry,” said Padayachee, “is that they are the biggest consumers of the university product – I mean, imagine an engineering company without the university? But industry often contributes least to universities.”

This despite that fact that in economies such as Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia, the secret weapon of success had been business-government partnerships with education institutions. “And that is the way we need to go.”

Padayachee stressed that SANTRUST’s intention had been to develop a model that creates non-dependency on donors and funding. South Africa has been listed as a middle-income country, which means donor funding will dry up.

The trust conducted a needs assessment study in Africa. “We looked at what we needed to do to fast-track the PhD, to ensure that we could get supervisors, and to ensure we could build supervisors – while at the same time building our student capacity to ensure we could have this pipeline 20 years down the line when funding has dried up.

“We were looking at creating a cost-effective model. And we needed to inject an international kind of experience. We need to ensure the pipeline exists and there is a constant flow to replace those who leave the system.”

SANTRUST is on the PhD catch-up fast-track – and is now looking at the road ahead.