AFRICA

India’s soft power moves in African higher education
The fruits of a conference held in Delhi in 2008, hosted by the Indian government and attended by African heads of state, are beginning to ripen – perhaps more in the field of higher education than in any other area of cooperation. The Asian country is setting up a string of institutes and collaborations across Africa.The India-Africa Forum envisaged closer economic and cultural ties in a ‘soft power’ move seen by analysts as an effort by the emerging South Asian giant to make its mark alongside China. The latter’s footprints can be seen across the continent, especially in the area of infrastructure development.
Cooperation in the field of education has ballooned since the 2008 conference, with India setting up institutes, supporting programmes and thousands of African students enrolling at Indian universities – a situation last seen in the 1980s, when African countries still had only a handful of public institutions and few or no private universities.
Africa now has close to 50,000 students in Indian universities, around 15,000 of them on Indian and Commonwealth scholarships.
India and Africa also enjoy close trade relations dating back hundreds of years. Africa is India’s fourth largest trading partner after the United States, China and Europe. The value of trade was estimated at US$57 billion in 2011 and was projected to grow to US$90 billion by 2015.
Analysts say that India's approach to relations with Africa is focused on the areas of knowledge transfer and bilateral trade. There is hope that India could help develop higher education in Africa, as competition between India and China grows.
West Africa
In West Africa, prominent Anglophone countries Ghana and Nigeria have taken full advantage of growing ties with India.
Hundreds of students are now studying in India and university partnerships and joint institutes have been created in efforts to transfer Indian expertise and training standards, especially in the field of information and communication technology (ICT).
Under the auspices of the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme, some 1,200 Nigerian students enrolled in universities in India in 2011 alone, in what Indian High Commissioner to Lagos Mahesh Sachdev described as a significant step towards regaining a “glorious bilateral past between the two countries”.
With more students expected to head east, an Indian Education Expo was held in Lagos in May, bringing together more than 12 Indian higher education institutions. It was a great success, judging by the growing number of attendees since the expo was first held in 2011.
The high number was partly driven, ITEC sources said, by scholarships offered to students under the Special Commonwealth Assistance for Africa programme. It has thus far awarded at least 500 scholarships, with most students heading for India because of its vibrant higher education sector and affordable fees.
In Ghana some 1,100 students are enrolled at Indian institutions in fields that include medicine, engineering and ICT.
India and Ghana are also involved in institutional and capacity-building partnerships aimed at knowledge sharing and transfer. The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre for excellence in ICT is being set up in Accra, aimed at helping young graduates to polish their ICT skills.
Ghana will also house a planned India-Africa Institute of Information Technology, which will offer courses in software development with the help of Education Consultants India, a government-owned consultancy.
The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology is working on collaborations with Indian universities for high quality training in ICT-related degree courses.
Indian support for institutes and collaboration
Indian government leaders have said that the country will support the establishment of a dozen institutes across Africa.
They will include a diamond-training institute in southern Africa, an Institute of Administration, Planning and Education (IAPE) in Burundi, an Institute for Foreign Trade in Uganda, an Institute for Information Technology in Ghana and a Pan-African Stock Exchange Institute in Egypt.
Timelines for establishing the bodies have not yet been finalised. But the Hindustan Times reported that the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, India's chief higher education policy planning university, would help set up the IAPE in Burundi, which will be an apex body to lead education policy and administration planning across Africa.
The Pan Africa e-Network, or PAEN, in which India is involved with the African Union, aims to deliver tele-education to African students in 53 countries through a satellite and fibreoptic network to India.
It was launched in 2009, is already active in some 34 countries, and is enabling access to and sharing of expertise between India and Africa in areas including tele-education, tele-medicine, resource mapping, meteorological services, and e-governance and e-commerce.
According to India’s external affairs ministry, the PAEN network hopes to link 10,000 African students to some of India’s best universities by 2015.
India has been asked to support the Pan-African University (PAU), a continental research-oriented institution aimed at training PhD students and conducting problem-solving research. India appears set to assist the PAU’s Earth and Life Sciences Institute at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
African Union Commissioner for Human Resources, Science and Technology Jean-Pierre Ezin was reported in the Indian press as saying that Africa wanted to foster bilateral relations with the rising Asian power, focused on human resource and capacity development.
He told the Indo-Africa News Service while visiting India in 2010 that Africa hoped for low-visibility projects focused on the future of the continent. What Africa needed from India was knowledge transfer and building human capital to accelerate development.
These are some of the initiatives agreed to by India and the African Union at the second India-Africa conference, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, two years ago – a follow-up to the first forum in 2008.
At the summit Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged to contribute US$700 million to education and skills development in Africa, part of which would go towards ICT development.