Lack of quality assurance affects employment opportunities

Low quality assurance mechanisms are to blame for the deteriorating standard of university education in Tanzania, after the country embarked on a fast expansion of higher education, a government audit report has shown.

Earlier in 2021, the 2019-20 report by the country’s Controller and Auditor General, Charles Kichere, presented to Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan documents indicating that the country’s graduates’ competitiveness has been hampered by poor and outdated quality assurance mechanisms.

“We found out that some universities have not conducted a review of quality control to adapt them to dynamic new teaching trends and have no reports on quality assurance. Others had no policies, regulations or programme-work in quality control,” Kichere said in the report that has been tabled in parliament.

Even where universities had developed quality assurance tools, such as at Mzumbe University, near Morogoro in Eastern Tanzania; Ardhi University in Dar es Salaam and the University of Dar es Salaam, the report said, such practices were outdated and unable to support proper quality controls, especially in research fields.

Shortage of quality assurance experts

The audit report added that the Tanzania Ministry of Education, Science and Technology quality assurance mechanism was weak and limited. The report said the ministry lacked quality inspectors and those available did not carry out a wholesale evaluation of universities.

“These challenges of weak quality assurance systems have led to continued production of weak graduates without the necessary skills to compete in the job market,” said Kichere.

The report recommended that the government employ more trained inspectors to carry out frequent assessments to ensure higher education quality.

And it called on the government to increase budget allocations to universities, improve their infrastructure and keep their equipment up to date.

“Universities should also establish a programme of investment in educational infrastructure and tools of learning where a certain percentage of local income is used in the implementation of the improvement plan of the infrastructure and equipment,” said the report.

“Better infrastructure facilitates better teaching, improves student outcomes, and reduces the number of dropouts, [among] other benefits,” it adds.

Expansion without quality

Dr Lecton Moris, secretary-general at the Tanzania Higher Learning Institutions Students’ Organization, welcomed the report, but said it just scratched the surface.

“The report is transparent ... However, it’s not detailed enough to give a remedy to what ails our university education,” he told University World News, calling for a total overhaul of Tanzania’s current higher education system which he termed old and outdated.

“We just have an education system that is out of sync with current realities,” he said, stressing its lack of technological and vocational focus.

Amukowa Anangwe, a professor of political science at the University of Dodoma, attributed the poor quality of Tanzanian university education to inadequate physical facilities, poor teaching faculties and unresponsive general education policies in Tanzania.

In sentiments echoed by Moris, Anangwe said even though access to university education has been expanded since 2014, the quality of education has fallen.

The late Tanzanian president Dr John Pombe Magufuli (who died in March) amended the law on student loans to ease lending and also the recovery of unused loans by students who drop out.

He also expanded Higher Education Students’ Loans Board budgets from Tanzanian Shillings TZS464 billion (US$200 million) in 2020-21 to TZS500 billion for the fiscal year 2021-22.

This saw the number of students benefiting from the funds increase to 145,000 in 2020-21 from only 93,100 in 2014-15.

He also tried to build on work from predecessor president Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete to invest in university infrastructure, although computing and telecommunications investment were neglected, said Anangwe.

Infrastructure needs

A top university administrator who spoke to University World News on condition of anonymity said this growth in facilities, and increasing free provision of primary and secondary education, had generated an upsurge in university admissions.

But teaching quality was given short shrift: “We are obsessed with the feel-good and political optics. The higher numbers of admissions and infrastructure weren’t matched with the necessary human resources to steer the sector,” the university manager said.

This, he said, had strained human resources in universities, making them unable to deliver quality lectures to their students.

“But we are glad this report is coming out in public,” he said, noting that it would not have happened under the government of President Magufuli, who was intolerant of criticism and had been accused of authoritarianism.

“I hope it acts as a wake-up call to us, to change how we operate so we can offer not only quality but competitive education to our students,” he added.

Anangwe said Tanzania has too few trained professors to handle the expansion, which has involved junior and assistant tutors, who ideally should be assisting with, rather than delivering lectures, taking over classes and teaching subjects they have not mastered.

“The consequence of being taught by someone who has a wobbly grasp of the discipline is a weak graduate who cannot compete in the job market,” he said.

He said the situation has been made worse by the language policy insisting that Swahili be the language of instruction rather than English.

“If you have weak lecturers, a fallback could be books but, unfortunately, many books and research resources are in English,” he added.

Graduate unemployment

Moris said with weak lecturers in play, there was an over-reliance on theoretical rather than practical teaching. And this has prevented Tanzanian graduates from becoming competitive in the job market.

Science-based lessons were the most affected, with a dearth of practical classes. “We have a skill [jobs] mismatch. This is because of the outdated university education curriculum,” he said.

“Our students can’t compete in the job markets in the region nor even use the skills [needed] to address the current national political, social and economic needs of our country,” Moris said, calling for a review of the entire higher education curriculum to improve graduate quality.

Samson Andwele, a second-year student of architecture, construction economics and management at Ardhi University, said many universities lacked the infrastructure to offer hands-on teaching.

“Many universities lack laboratories or the necessary industry linkages where we can go and have practical lessons, denying us an upper hand in the labour market,” he told University World News.

“This needs to be looked into as a matter of urgency, so that every student who completes university comes out fully prepared to face the challenge of the job market,” he added.

Apart from tightening quality controls, Anangwe – an international expert on public sector administration – called on the Tanzanian government to open up exchange programmes and offer more financial incentives to professors at home and abroad to attract them into lecture halls, including offering them scholarships.