World Bank plans for Mali’s tattered universities

The World Bank is developing a comprehensive project to rehabilitate Mali’s struggling public universities, which have been drained of highly qualified teaching staff, lack degree diversification and are housed in inappropriate rental spaces in the capital Bamako.

According to Pierre Joseph Kamano, the project’s team leader, universities in Mali are in urgent need of revitalisation as they have deteriorated to the point of being unable to produce graduates with the skills required by the country’s labour market.

“There is limited emphasis on learning inputs such as books and scientific documentation, information and computer technology, laboratory equipment and supplies, research activities, staff recruitment and development, and investment in infrastructure,” says Kamano.

The situation is compounded by uncontrolled student admissions, high repetition rates and overcrowding.

According to the concept document of the project, which is set to be approved in March next year, two thirds of all university students are enrolled in law and humanities.

“Lack of adequate science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines, in addition to a poor regulatory and information framework and weak university governance, have constrained the supply of skills available to key sectors of the Malian economy,” it says.

Backdrop

The problems prevailing in Mali’s higher education system may partly be traced to tenacious insecurity in the north, which led to rebels attacking and seizing three main regions. This was followed by a coup d’état in March 2012 and a de-facto military government, which in turn led to the suspension of donor support.

Although normalcy was largely restored last year through democratic elections, the shock of the crisis still reverberates through the country’s tertiary institutions.

According to Kamano, most university campuses are relying on high school teachers as lecturers, libraries are out of date and research output has plummeted.

“Students are protesting overcrowded facilities and inhospitable conditions, and educational quality is deteriorating at alarming rates,” says Kamano.

Mali’s university education sector is largely public, stemming from the University of Bamako, which was established about two decades ago but was dismantled three years ago to give way to four new universities.

They are the University of Social Studies and Management of Bamako, University of Science and Technology of Bamako, University of Social Studies and Humanities of Bamako and University of Law of Bamako. There is also the University of Segou, created in 2010.

Lack of development

Unfortunately, despite fragmentation of the University of Bamako, no investment was made by the government to develop new campuses to accommodate the four new universities.

“Private premises were rented in the capital Bamako to host the new universities exacerbating overcrowding, which led to low internal efficiency,” says the World Bank’s project paper.

At the University of Law, 30,000 students were enrolled in the 2012-13 academic year. During the same period, the University of Segou experienced a first year failure rate of above 80%.

The government is reported to have paid US$1.4 million for rental space to deliver lectures to students last year.

In 2012-13 the teacher-student ratio stood at 1:160 – reducing this ratio to reasonable levels is one of the priorities that the World Bank project is expected to address, along with acquiring pedagogical inputs in order to increase internal and external efficiency and improving the public financing of higher education.

It is believed that better allocation of resources and enhanced institutional diversification of degree programmes would not just reduce the teacher-student ratio but would also make universities more attractive and competitive.

Major challenges faced

According to the World Bank, those challenges will not be erased any time soon, as there has been no comprehensive staff development plan to meet the present and future teaching load and quality requirements.

Missing in action are talented PhD graduates who might have benefitted from bilateral scholarships and who could be used to establish postgraduate programmes in some of the universities created from the former University of Bamako.

Political conflicts in Mali and extreme resource constraints in universities forced some highly talented local academics to abandon campuses in search of employment elsewhere.

“The few that were left have been frustrated by the lack of a critical mass of qualified staff to establish postgraduate programmes, amid the absence of an atmosphere conducive to research and scholarship,” says Kamano.

The World Bank plan includes training faculty and postgraduate students to become lecturers while building partnerships with international higher education institutions that would include the new African Centres of Excellence that the bank is funding.

Above all, the World Bank is urging the government to undertake radical reforms to the university education system by addressing systemic and institutional governance gaps.

The bank is concerned that the government of Mali is spending over US$40 million per year – 56% of the entire higher education budget – on student scholarships and extra teaching.

“Indeed, the bulk of the higher education budget is allocated to students’ welfare and extra teaching hours at the expense of pedagogical inputs, which is indicative of poor utilisation of limited resources,” notes the World Bank project paper.

A major problem is that higher education in Mali is almost free. High school graduates are admitted automatically to university and are granted a scholarship, irrespective of household income, while there is no management system to monitor enrolments and scholarship provisions to avoid ‘ghost’ students.

Ways forward

While the World Bank is keen to revitalise Mali’s public higher education system, the project paper argues that there is a need to establish performance standards for higher education in order to enforce accountability and avoid management gaps.

The bank is also urging the government to establish a comprehensive regulatory and financing framework to support the development of private higher education institutions and university-industry linkages.

The project is expected to bring about higher education reforms through economic diversification by increasing the ability of the tertiary education sector to produce relevant, high quality graduates, especially in science, technology and engineering.

There is no doubt from the project document that if the World Bank has its way, students in Mali’s tattered universities would no longer automatically receive scholarships but possibly student loans.

So far, participating tertiary institutions have been selected based on the availability of programmes in targeted economic sectors and they include the University of Science and Technology of Bamako, the National School of Engineering of Bamako, the University of Segou and the Institute Polytechnic Rural at Katibougou.

The bulk of the financing will be used to introduce short technical degrees that lead to professionalisation.

“The thrust of the project is to highlight science and technology as well as introducing new and better degree programmes while still fostering higher participation of private higher education institutions, in order to respond to challenges of relevance and quality,” says Kamano.