African universities – Imitation or adaptation?

Over the past few decades, Amartya Sen’s theory of human capability with its focus on expanding or enhancing human capital has become dominant in national development discourse. It challenges orthodox development theories like economic growth, dependency and trade.

Accordingly, African governments have demonstrated an active interest in establishing or allowing private entrepreneurs to set up universities and other higher education institutions.

These efforts have the principal objective of providing the populace with a formal means of acquiring new skills, knowledge, aptitudes and dispositions, expanding or enhancing their capabilities. Human capabilities are considered the real drivers of economic growth, poverty reduction and overall improvement in social well-being.

However, does African universities’ practice of academic imitation constitute a stumbling block to expanding or enhancing students’ capabilities and is academic adaptation a more effective approach?

The vast majority of African universities and other higher education institutions imitate with a high degree of exactitude Western universities’ academic curricula objectives, content, assessment approaches and learning materials.

The imitation occurs in all academic disciplines, including the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, business and technology. It is not only the pioneering universities established by African former colonial masters that are guilty of academic imitation. Post-colonial African universities are equally guilty.

Academic imitation is guided by the following questions: What are the names of disciplines offered in Western universities? What courses are offered in those disciplines? What textbooks and other learning resources are used in those courses and how could they be obtained?

Such academic imitation destroys human creativity and prospects of producing innovative curricula and pedagogies. It also leads to wholesale importation of academic programmes and courses that are grossly irrelevant to the development, expansion or enhancement of students' capabilities.

A striking illustration are bachelor and postgraduate degree courses in social work, management and engineering.

More specifically, it is highly unlikely that copycat courses in management will help to produce the entrepreneurs, managers and administrators needed to advance the continent’s economic growth, provide direction to bolster existing industries and create new opportunities.

Most importantly, academic imitation has the tendency to ignore local priorities. This is because imported courses were originally designed without due consideration for African society and the African economy. In other words, copycat degree courses imported from Western universities are not universally applicable.

For instance, courses in bachelor and postgraduate degrees in archaeology and classics (Greek and Roman civilisations) are invariably imported or implanted from Western Europe. Consequently, students find them not only intellectually unstimulating but utterly irrelevant to the development of their capabilities.

In management studies, for example, it is not just that textbooks, theories and frameworks are imported from the West. The case studies are too, so future African managers, entrepreneurs and leaders are not being prepared to manage African-specific business organisations, practices or problems.

Social work education faces similar problems. Because the discipline is imported in its entirety it does not focus on addressing African contextual problems like public institution corruption, tribalism, the impact of and attitudes to HIV/AIDS, poverty, etc.

Nor does it recognise African traditional institutions such as chieftaincy and African systems of land ownership. The recognition or participation of African chiefs is fundamental to the success of any community development project. It is also not possible in an African context to discuss healthcare without including herbal medicine and shrines.

Achieving international recognition

Most African public universities are preoccupied with achieving international recognition and that is the principal cause of academic imitation. In fact, it is an age-old source of pride for African public universities to achieve a modicum of international recognition. Yet it is one of the most intractable colonial mentalities that contributes immensely to African underdevelopment.

The core dictum runs like this: if our universities’ academic programmes, courses and course content is the same as those of universities in the United Kingdom, United States or other Western countries then we are equal to them. This is an absolute illusion. It suggests that African universities, often touted as a tool for national development, are in actuality a tool for other countries’ development.

Furthermore, what happens to the local is that it is not considered as important as the international in looking at the relevance of African public universities. Nevertheless, from my perspective the commonsensical expectation is that local priorities should influence the main purposes of African public universities, not international ones. If African society and economy are not benefiting from their own universities, that suggests that the universities are irrelevant.

One critical conclusion is that African public university courses, their objectives, contents and pedagogies should all be designed with the African society and economy as their fundamental bases. And the effectiveness of an African university should be assessed based solely on its contribution to African society and the economy.

The way forward

The way forward for African universities is to apply the principle of adaptation, which is based on taking a concept and making it one’s own through creative modification or tweaking. It could be termed indigenising the concept.

Its primary goal is to develop course content and learning materials that are unique and relevant to the continent. In this way one could study the course offerings of other universities to gain valuable insights without having the purpose of imitating them.

The adaptation approach is guided by the following set of questions: What need in African society do we want to fulfil? What academic programmes and corresponding courses could provide students with the experiences they need for developing skills, knowledge and attitudes that could be applied to satisfy those societal needs?

How could students attending these courses be continuously assessed to ensure that they are developing those skills, knowledge and attitudes considered necessary for expanding their capabilities? How are these courses organised and delivered in other universities across the globe? What can be learned from other universities regarding the curricular content, learning resources and organisation of those courses?

These questions imply that designing relevant, African-focused university courses involves elaborate planning, data collection, analysis and decision-making. It is not simply a matter of copying or mimicking Western paradigms.

Dr Eric Fredua-Kwarteng is an educator and policy consultant.