Governments frustrate knowledge vision – African Union

The African Union’s vision of a prosperous continent driven by a knowledge economy has been frustrated by many countries not making education a priority in development plans, according to the AU Outlook on Education Report 2014. The hard-hitting report says progress towards improving education access and quality at all levels has been too slow.

“Across Africa, most countries are off track and have failed to shift gears and develop the relevant human resources,” says the report.

According to Dr Martial De-Paul Ikounga, commissioner for human resources, science and technology at the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, the problem is more critical in higher education where quality is the main challenge.

Financing, expansion problems

Ikounga partly attributed the problem of university education across the continent to the skewed financing model that puts the bulk of the cost of higher education – including students’ direct costs such as tuition fees as well as stipends, bursaries and scholarships – on governments.

“Taking into account that higher education is capital and labour-intensive, many African countries have been unable to allocate adequate resources to the sector,” said Ikounga.

The report noted that Africa spends only about 1% of its gross domestic product on higher education and an average of 6% on the entire education sector.

While there has been expansion of higher education in Africa since 2006, access remains the lowest among the world regions.

The expansion profile also varies greatly among countries, with Algeria, Mauritius and Tunisia recording the highest access of 33 tertiary students per 1,000 inhabitants as compared to Seychelles and Niger with only one tertiary learner per 1,000 inhabitants.

Too teaching oriented

According to Dr Mohamed Cherif Diarra, a consultant to the Dakar-based UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Africa, the continent’s higher education crisis extends beyond financing and expansion challenges.

He pointed out that university education in most countries had failed to deliver on the African Union’s vision because it was fundamentally oriented towards teaching, with little focus on research.

But research could play a pivotal role in the production of knowledge and creation of innovation to support Africa’s improving position in the global economy.

“The research environment remains replete with challenges, universities are predominantly teaching institutions rather than research institutions,” said Diarra, who is a specialist in education management and one of the key writers of the AU Outlook.

The crux of the matter is that Africa generates less than 1% of total research produced worldwide, placing the continent far at the bottom of the global research scale.

“Basic research, which is a precondition for scientific knowledge production, is rarely given the importance it deserves in African universities,” notes the report.

According to the report, African universities are characterised by an absence of graduate programmes – a situation that has limited institutions’ research capacities.

Quoting the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, CODESRIA, Diarra identified a paucity of doctoral programmes as African higher education’s weakest point.

He argued that if Africa was to make progress towards knowledge production and innovation, then there was an urgent need to establish more PhD programmes to ensure the training of a critical mass of scientists and researchers across the continent.

Missed goals

Commissioner Ikounga said that Africa would not meet the goals outlined in the African Union’s “Second Decade of Education for Africa (2006-2015) – Plan of Action”.

The current plan identified six thematic education goals to be achieved by all African countries by 2015:

• • Establish functional national educational management information systems, connected to regional and management systems, to tackle a ‘data blank’ that has inhibited clear articulation of challenges and opportunities, and hindered planning, monitoring and evaluation.
  
• • Mainstream education into the policies, programme activities and organisational structures of the African Union Commission and regional economic communities.
  
• • Significantly raise educational achievement in terms of access, quality, efficiency and relevance, while addressing teacher education and higher education for development concerns.
  
• • Attain gender equality in primary and secondary education.
  
• • Bridge the gender gap in participation in mathematics, science and technology at the tertiary level.
  
• • Institutionalise systematic exchange of experiences and mutual assistance for educational development.

While some countries had made some progress in a number of areas, little had been achieved at the tertiary level of education.

According to AU Outlook, matters related to low transition rates to higher education and inequity – with fewer women and students from rural areas and vulnerable groups gaining access to universities – remained sticky issues in most countries.

For instance, with a few exceptions such as South Africa, Lesotho and Mauritius, where gender parity in higher education has been achieved, university enrolments show a marked imbalance in favour of male students.

Even when gender parity is not heavily skewed, the distribution profile shows that men are heavily enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and females in ‘soft’ areas in the social sciences and humanities.

Despite sketchy and fragmented data, it is clear that there are huge disparities in higher education in Africa – within and between countries, regardless of general access. While the African Union estimates that the average gross enrolment rate stands at 10.88%, for young women it could be as little as 3%.

“We are also quite aware that more middle-class urban high school graduates are entering universities in large numbers than their counterparts from rural areas and urban slums,” said Diarra.

HE, skills and economies

Interestingly, although higher education globally is viewed as a catalyst for socio-economic equality and mobility, the assumption in Africa is hotly debated with questions being raised about the relevance of university education.

This is because a large segment of graduates from African universities are finding it hard to get jobs. According to the African Union, the principal obstacles are related to skills mismatches and absence of linkages between education and the labour market.

Such views are also amplified by the recently published African Economic Outlook 2014, the in-depth annual report on sectors crucial to Africa’s development jointly published by the African Development Bank, the OECD, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the United Nations Development Programme.

It shows that at the tertiary level, most students in Africa are confronted with a university system that has traditionally been focused on educating for public sector employment, with little regard for the needs of the private sector.

On education and skills mismatch, African Economic Outlook 2014 faulted African universities for neglecting job creation. “African universities do not educate for African needs,” it says.

Quoting recruitment managers and temporary work agencies, the African Economic Outlook says that currently there are not enough graduates with specialised skills to work in extractive industries, logistics, chemical and pharmaceutical industries and agribusiness.

Unfortunately, most graduates from African universities do not just lack technical skills but are also unemployable because of having limited communication skills and other soft skills such as computer literacy and problem-solving abilities.

But with less than two years before the deadline, it is evident that most African countries will not achieve the objectives set for higher education under the “Second Decade of Education for Africa (2006-2015) – Plan of Action”.