EAC slashes budget for harmonising higher education

The East African Community, or EAC, has slashed its budget for harmonising education systems and curricula in the five member countries in the coming fiscal year, further slowing a process that has nearly flopped due to financial constraints.

Budgetary estimates produced by the EAC secretariat, the executive arm of the trade bloc, earlier this month showed that the Inter-University Council for East Africa, or IUCEA, will receive US$9.6 million – just down from the current year’s $10 million.

The IUCEA is the regional body charged by the five countries with harmonising their education systems.

According to the documents, of the US$9.6 million, $5.6 million is expected to come from donors, while the balance will be contributions from the partner states: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

Educationists and managers at IUCEA had hoped that the body would get a big financial boost to unlock the harmonisation process, which has also been hampered by conflicting nationalist interests among the five EAC countries.

Laxity has been noted among the countries in supporting some of the EAC projects meant to be undertaken jointly, even though the nations ostensibly hope to form an integrated bloc with a common market, currency and education, which will eventually grow into a political federation.

In most of the joint projects, differences have emerged over approaches, with countries seen as unwilling to lose autonomy as individual states.

The IUCEA’s funding crisis is expected to worsen during the next fiscal year beginning in July, also because partner states have been slow to contribute their share of money to the agency.

The budget estimates show that at least 40% of the $4 million that member states were supposed to contribute to IUCEA in the current fiscal year is yet to come through: US1.7 million.

Kenya has already cleared its quota. Uganda is the biggest defaulter, owing $729,247. Tanzania owes the least at $42,646, Rwanda $401,610 and Burundi has a $550,159 debt. The Council of Ministers, the EAC’s decision-making organ, has directed partner states to remit outstanding contributions for the 2012-13 financial year.

“The board of the IUCEA is to revisit the matter of historical arrears accumulated before the year 2000 and propose a way forward in resolving this matter,” said a report produced by the Council of Ministers.

The EAC has also set aside an extra budget of US$2.5 million for the construction of the IUCEA’s headquarters in Uganda, as it sought more funds from donors.

Since 2011 the regional bloc has considered harmonising its education systems and training curricula in the fields of education, science and technology, and culture, sports and youth affairs, but the dream is still being hampered by structural and financial constraints.

Last year, the EAC approved the key Inter University Council for East Africa (IUCEA) Bill 2012, seeking to harmonise and standardise university education systems.

This removed the barrier that was blocking the region from rolling out a system that would allow students access to learning and mobility across East Africa. The countries had been tussling over several provisions in the bill since its first version was released in 2009.

Educationists said the focus was now on whether countries would obey the law, which will usher in major changes to the way higher education in the region is run. It is not clear when the bill will be effective, since no date has been given.

Among other things, the bill allows university students to move freely across the bloc’s institutions via a credit accumulation and transfer arrangement.

This means, for example, a Kenyan student will be able to enrol at the University of Nairobi but graduate at Uganda’s Makerere University without having to lose study years or course credits. It is currently impossible to do this.

The current funding is meant to support credit accumulation and transfer as well as other actions that will achieve a fully unified university system in the region – an objective that flopped with the 1977 collapse of the EAC, which was revived only in recent years.

EAC countries have already set in motion an economic integration process that saw them sign a Common Market Protocol in July 2011, allowing free movement of labour and goods across the region.

The governments of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda fostered the establishment of the present-day IUCEA in 1980, with the objectives of facilitating contact between universities in East Africa, providing a forum for discussion on a range of academic and other matters relating to higher education, and helping maintain high and comparable academic standards.

But the system could increase the cost pressures on universities, as more expensive institutions may ultimately find themselves with fewer students as students opt for cheaper alternatives in one of the other five member countries.

Education experts have warned that competition for student will increase, prompting some universities to charge lower fees.

According to the IUCEA Executive Secretary Professor Mayunga Nkunya, there has been resistance from EAC member states who view the policy as a way of forcing governments to educate members of other states cheaply.

“Most governments subsidise fees of their local students so as to try to educate all people in their state and create labour within. Because of this, most of them have not received this policy well since it will be creating labour for another state,” Nkunya told reports in Entebbe, Uganda, last month.

The planned reforms come at a time when the higher education sectors in the EAC are facing a credibility crisis, with the quality of learning said to be crumbling.