COVID-19 brings opportunities to broaden third stream income

When the coronavirus pandemic hit Zimbabwe in April, both public and private universities had no choice but to start manufacturing sanitisers and personal protective equipment (PPE) to plug a national shortage of the in-demand life-saving materials.

In the last few months, many of the production facilities have gone commercial and have expanded the range of products they are manufacturing, which has assisted many of the universities to diversify their revenue generation capacity in the wake of dwindling government funding.

Public higher education institutions in Zimbabwe depend on the government for 80% of their funding, with fees and other sources accounting for 15% and 5% respectively. As a result an increase in third-stream income, which could include fundraising, contract research and the commercialisation of research, is critical for higher education institutions.

In the past 40 years, the country’s higher education sector has expanded from one public university in 1980 to the current 21 universities (14 public and seven private). But the government’s funding of higher education has declined drastically over the years due to a poorly performing economy. At the same time the expansion of the university sector has made the funding cake smaller, leaving many universities struggling to survive.

Initiative becomes commercial

The advent of COVID-19 has presented the country’s state-owned universities – the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), Chinhoyi University of Technology, National University of Science and Technology, Great Zimbabwe University (GZU), Harare Institute of Technology, Midlands State University and Bindura University of Science Education – with opportunities to increase their revenue streams.

Professor Obert Jiri, the coordinator in the sanitiser and PPE production plant at UZ, said although his university started producing PPE materials as a way to provide desperately-needed COVID-19 essentials, the initiative has gone commercial and made the university self-sustaining.

"We are not going to stop with COVID-19. That is why you find that our products range is not only based on sanitisers, disinfectants and PPE, but we have moved into hand washing, into liquid soaps, including work suits and so forth, so that we are an industry that produces various goods and services," he told a local news agency recently.

The university, which is relying on students' know-how, is currently producing 6,000 litres of hand sanitisers and about 5,000 masks a day. So far the university has produced more than 400,000 face masks, roughly a million theatre caps and tens of thousands of theatre gowns.

Textile factory helps people in province

In October GZU set up a textile factory at its Industrial Park Complex, Masvingo. The textile factory has been instrumental in the manufacturing of PPE and face masks for health workers and the general public in the Masvingo province.

Rungano Zvobgo, GZU vice-chancellor, said at the university’s virtual graduation in the last week of October, that the industrial complex was a commercial wing of the university that will generate revenue to augment the university’s working capital.

The Harare Institute of Technology (HIT) is another university which has rolled out many projects besides producing sanitisers, that have widened the university’s income stream. These include the COVID-19 Alert Reporting Management System from the institute’s Technology Transfer, Commercialisation and Licensing Centre, as well as the mass urban bus transport tap card payment system, the national fuel smartcard and the Bureau de Change payment system, among others.

The COVID-19 alert system is an android-based mobile application and a web-based application that tracks real-time statistics of cases in the country. With the tap card payment system, passengers who board public transport use the card instead of cash, thus enabling a cashless transport system. The national fuel smartcard is aimed at greater accountability in the fuel value chain system.

University staff not entrepreneurial

A study, “The challenges of revenue generation in state universities: The case of Zimbabwe,” published in April 2020 by Andrias Chinyoka and Emmanuel Mutambara, identified a tough macro-economic environment, inhibitive legislation on tuition fees, limited fiscal space and equipment, reduction in government support, rising demand for higher education, severe financial stringency and limited entrepreneurial skills among university staff as major challenges to revenue generation among state universities.

“Initial funding for high capital requirements may be a barrier to embark on some income-generating projects such as mechanisation or modernisation of university farming projects.

“Universities are by nature knowledge producers not fundraisers. Staff earn enough, thus they are not interested in fundraising. Financial resources to start businesses are not enough. The eagerness is also not there."

Tuition levels are regulated by the government with recommendations from university fees revision committees, but levies per semester depend on the university, the study established.

Chinyoka and Mutambara argued that there was a need for universities to determine their tuition fees, incentivise those who raise revenue and provide small loans to needy universities to start their own businesses to become self-reliant.