Research productivity at flagship African universities

Of the four core functions of universities identified by Manuel Castells [1], the African university is struggling most with revitalising its research function. All relevant indicators show that despite the existence of a number of highly productive scholars and academic units, overall the research productivity of nationally leading African universities is lagging far behind productivity at similar universities in the rest of the world.



Recent work by Sheila Slaughter [2] shows that research productivity at universities is strongly stimulated by the workings of a prestige economy – that is, the effects of highly prestigious external research funds for which university academics compete.

Success in the external competition for research funds correlates directly with academic prestige, intra-university autonomy and high research productivity.

Two paradoxes

The lagging behind of African universities in research productivity reflects two important paradoxes.

The first paradox is between remarkable economic growth in many African countries and the lack of national programmes for stimulating development of the nation’s research universities in the direction the emerging economy is requiring. The second is between African universities’ institutional research strategies and their research practices.

In a chapter of the book Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education, Gordon Musiige and Peter Maassen discuss this latter paradox, with a special focus on Makerere University in Uganda [3].

They address the question of why research productivity at Makerere is low despite the rather straightforward institutional research strategies and the relatively high levels of research funding invested in the university.

In the study by Musiige underlying the chapter, faculty perceptions and experiences were examined with respect to the factors that influence research productivity at Makerere. Four main factors were identified as impacting on research productivity – that is, individual factors, organisational factors, funding, and research culture.

The funding factor

Obviously, funding has a major impact on the nature and sustainability of research capacity at Makerere, and consequently on the university’s research productivity.

The contextual realities of academics employed by Makerere – such as low salaries, absence of incentive structures, poor infrastructure and lack of a professional research management – are to a large extent the result of a lack of consistent and adequate funding earmarked for research.

This is not the result of a lack of research funding per se, since Makerere’s level of research income can be compared to the level of research funding at the University of Cape Town. Rather, the nature and source of research funding are of relevance here.

As the HERANA – Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa – project showed, almost 80% of Makerere’s research income comes from donor agencies, implying that the university’s leadership has limited to no influence on how this money is invested in the institution’s research activities.

Consequently, unlike the situation in research universities in the OECD or South Africa, the institutional leadership at Makerere lacks the level of institutional research income needed to build an adequate academic and infrastructural foundation for institutional research activities.

This makes it very difficult for Makerere, and other research universities in Africa, to develop a collective, organisational dimension in research activities.

Lack of research culture

Nonetheless, at Makerere more could have been done to stimulate the development of a stronger research culture in the institution.

Currently, the university’s human resource policy stimulates academic staff members with PhD degrees to engage in the first place in teaching. Tenured academic staff members have no accountability to the institution with regard to engagement in research.

The university could stimulate the strengthening of an institutional research culture by, for example, introducing adequate incentives and rewards for academics who engage in research.

The current situation in which Makerere uses the income from tuition fees generated from privately sponsored students to pay lecturers who have additional teaching loads – evening, weekend and extra-mural – does not contribute in one way or another to strengthen the institutional research culture.

Individual vs organisational?

When academics at Makerere were asked to rank the four research productivity factors – organisational, individual, funding and research culture – in terms of importance for them personally, many of them acknowledged the role of individual factors in determining the success of any academic researcher around the world.

However, in their specific institutional context, funding played a greater role when it came to its impact on creating a sense of career continuity for individual researchers.

At the same time, there is hardly any collective – that is, institutional – component in research funding at Makerere, implying a loose coupling between the institutional research ambitions and strategies, and individual academic staff members’ (lack of) engagement in research activities.

The low research productivity of Makerere University and the main factors responsible for it are not unique.

Other African research universities are also lacking an effective coupling of institutional research strategies and capacities with institutional research practices, while there are also only weak national contexts stimulating competitive, high prestige research environments.

Only through strengthening these two essential couplings can the African research university in the middle to long run be expected to ‘catch up’ with the most productive research universities around the world.

Radical donor rethink needed

In this and other chapters of the Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education book, it is argued that donors will have to radically rethink how they support the development of a research university [4].

The investments of donor agencies in research projects at Sub-Saharan universities, such as Makerere, have a number of characteristics that contribute to the low research productivity of these universities.

First, in general, donor research funding is not distributed through an open competition, relying on peer review to select the academically best projects. Second, donor agencies in general do not require academics who receive funding from them for a research project to produce academic publications.

Third, most donor-funded research projects resemble more of a consultancy activity than an academic research project. Fourth, there is hardly any coordination between donor agencies when it comes to investments in research projects in Sub-Saharan African universities.

Overall, the individual donor agency’s programmes and ideologies seem to be a more important factor in determining which research project should receive donor funding, than national and-or institutional research policies and strategies in the receiving countries and institutions.

Fifth, donor agencies prefer in general to have direct contact with the academics who receive donor research funding. A consequence of this is the ‘projectisation’ nature of donor research funding – that is, donor agencies invest in projects, not in institutions, despite all the recent donor programme emphasis on ‘capacity building’.

The situation at Makerere shows how difficult it is for an ambitious African research university to realise its institutional research strategies, when almost 80% of institutional research funding comes from donors who prefer to invest on the basis of their own programmes and ideologies.

Professor Peter Maassen is a professor in higher education studies at the University of Oslo in Norway and head of the Higher Education Development Association, HEDDA. He is also a research professor in the research institute NIFU STEP in Oslo and guest professor at both the University of Georgia in the United States and JF Oberlin University in Tokyo, Japan.

References

• • 1- Castells M (1993) “The University System: Engine of development in the new world economy”. In: A Ransom, S-M Khoo and V Selvaratnam (eds), Improving Higher Education in Developing Countries. Washington DC: The World Bank, pp 65-80. Castells M (2009) “The Role of Universities in Development, the Economy and Society”. Transcript of a lecture given by Manuel Castells at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, August 2009: http://chet.org.za/files/uploads/repo...cation.pdf
  
• • 2- Rosinger K, Taylor BJ, Coco L and Slaughter S (2015 forthcoming) “Organisational Segmentation and the Prestige Economy: Deprofessionalization in high- and low-resource departments”. The Journal of Higher Education.
  
• • 3- Musiige G and Maassen P (2015) “Faculty Perceptions of the Factors that Influence Research Productivity at Makerere University”. In: N Cloete, P Maassen and T Bailey (eds), Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education. Cape Town: African Minds.
  
• • 4- Cloete N and Maassen P (2015) “Roles of universities and the African Context”. In: N Cloete, P Maassen and T Bailey (eds), Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education. Cape Town: African Minds.