Diamonds are higher education’s best friend

In 1994 Botswana joined the global education reform movement, choosing to use part of its diamond revenue to transform an elitist tertiary system accessible to few into a broad-based, equitable system where the focus is on relevance in terms of both the national development agenda and international competitiveness.

Botswana is the world’s second largest diamond producer after Russia, said Dr Patrick Molutsi, the landlocked Southern African country’s Tertiary Education Council executive secretary, when he presented his country report at the second QS-MAPLE conference, held in Durban, South Africa from 3-4 May.

Informing education policy, Molutsi said, was the fact that today the most technologically and economically advanced countries are also those with the best tertiary education participation rates.

“South Korea, with the highest tertiary education rate – 60% – is [one of] the most technologically advanced countries in the world,” he pointed out.

Revenue from the diamond industry had, during the past 40 years, effectively reduced abject poverty in Botswana from 60% at independence to 20%. In turn, life expectancy had risen from 40 years to around 65 years.

And money from diamonds had been pumped into educational reform from the bottom up, with the acknowledgment that strong primary and secondary schools were essential if high-calibre students were to be funnelled into the tertiary system, which was previously fragmented and is now being streamlined.

Botswana was regarded as a post-war success story and huge strides had been made, Molutsi said.

In higher education this was reflected, among other ways, in the fact that many students who previously would have been funded to study abroad – especially in South Africa and Malaysia – are now studying at tertiary institutions back home.

But tremendous challenges remained.

Botswana’s gross tertiary education enrolment rate had risen from 7% in 1998 to a current 14%, which Molutsi acknowledged was still low compared to upper-middle-income economies.

The country’s universities and tertiary education institutions in general had low research output – a consequences of professors having to moonlight to make ends meet.

Industry links were also weak, he said, and dependency on donor funding for research was high. Institutions relied on the government for more than 70% of their running budgets, and university funding averaged 15% of annual education expenditure.

Further, students were more likely to enrol in the humanities than in science and technology. The new Botswana International University of Science and Technology, currently under construction in the town of Palapye, could help to address this problem.

It is set to become the nation’s second largest university, after the University of Botswana in the country’s capital, Gaborone.

“I always describe Botswana as a rich state and a poor society,” said Molutsi.

Recession had taken its toll on enrolments and the government was slow in implementing reforms. When a system was highly dependent on public funding, quality improvements in tertiary education could be slow, he said.