Can universities meet development aims?

The National Development Plan’s vision puts education, training and innovation at the centre of South Africa's long-term development. But in international comparative terms, the country is not performing well in respect of producing new knowledge, writes Heather Nel for The Mail & Guardian.

In a 2011 background paper for the National Planning Commission, Nico Cloete and Nasima Badsha wrote that South Africa's entire higher education system produced just more than 9,000 Institute for Scientific Information research publications in 2010 – compared with the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, which produced 8,200.

Added to this, South Africa has about 1.5 full-time equivalent academic staff per 1,000 people employed, significantly less than countries that have a similar ratio of research and development spending to gross domestic product, such as Portugal (4.8) and Italy (3.6).
Full report on the Mail & Guardian site