Pandemic demands innovation in internationalisation

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down the internationalisation of higher education at a time when it was gaining momentum in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region and Africa at large. Moving forward, higher education institutions will have to rethink their internationalisation approaches and strategies in order to succeed.

Universities in the region will also have to innovate, and their responses to the changing rationale of internationalisation will determine whether they will succeed and adapt to the new normal emanating from the pandemic.

“Intra-African universities’ activities, joint degree programmes in the SADC universities, virtual conferences and webinars among universities are some of the areas that universities should focus on,” said Patricia Sakala, the head of international relations at the University of Zambia.

She addressed delegates at the Southern African Regional Universities Association’s (SARUA’s) second virtual colloquium, held on 28 May, which addressed the theme ‘Higher Education Internationalisation – Regional and South-South-North collaboration guiding future internationalisation’.

Sakala said that universities in the region should start thinking about interventions that do not require physical mobility and focus on virtual collaboration for their students and staff. Also, institutions should start looking more at local and regional virtual institutional collaborations, which would allow them to retain an element of international exposure.

She said a forced paradigm shift in internationalisation practice is taking place. Given the shift to online teaching, mobility is no longer part of internationalisation, since digital mobility for internationalisation has emerged.

“Quality of education and employability are the key drivers of internationalisation. Students will thus be required to use technology to collaborate virtually with their colleagues across the border on research which will integrate with global research networks,” noted Sakala.

Although income generation is a primary motivation for internationalisation by institutions and most universities were affected, she said that, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, universities should intensify their efforts to find alternative revenue streams.

Entrepreneurial efforts

Milton Gwakwa, a lecturer in business management at the private BA ISAGO University in Botswana, said African universities should see themselves as entrepreneurial organisations and environments held together by common values and entrepreneurial visions rather than detailed control systems.

According to him, higher learning institutions in Africa should leverage science and technology to catalyse faster social economic growth.

“Universities should have incubators on site that provide these services or provide assistance to staff, students and graduate entrepreneurs in accessing external facilities that provide this type of support,” said Gwakwa, adding that strategic international partnerships are an important component of an entrepreneurial institution, in particular through leadership.

“We need agile university leadership [with] the ability to take effective action in complex, rapidly changing conditions. Leaders require a foundation of self-awareness, an ability to reflect on opportunities, shift perspectives for the greater good and respond in ways that enhance relationships and drive meaningful results in order to be successful in today’s business environment,” he said.

He said that overcoming bureaucratic barriers is the key to unlocking universities’ entrepreneurship value. Universities with fewer barriers on hierarchies find it easy to undertake entrepreneurial activities and speed up idea creation and decision-making.

Pandemic’s impact

On addressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on internationalisation in the SADC, Joseph Musonda, a capacity building expert at UNICAF University, Zambia, said universities should work towards securing sustainable support for initiatives beyond external funding by negotiating collaborations between government and university personnel, overcoming conservative preferences by bureaucrats for outdated policies, injecting research evidence into policy development and professional practices.

“The effects of COVID-19 on internationalisation can be addressed through evidence-based research, embracing constructive communication between researchers and policy-makers and commitment to empowering professional practitioners with evidence-based techniques,” he said.

However, Musonda noted that there is tendency for national governments in Africa to turn to richer nations in the Global North for technical advice on ways of enhancing their national education and health services, research and development, rather than drawing on local and regional expertise.

Fernando de Souza, an executive director of the Portuguese Association for Creativity and Innovation in Loulé, Portugal, presented a study about collaboration with Rene Pellissier, the director of strategy and internationalisation in higher education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa, entitled ‘When North-South research thinking converges – a new innovation at the individual level’.

The case study focuses on the importance of building and maintaining relationships. “[The] value of international collaboration is not in dispute. We have all sorts of criteria to determine value. But signing yet another international agreement is not really what it is about,” De Souza said.

“Indeed, COVID-19 did a lot to mess up the old ways. The current definition of internationalisation of higher education does not help, either. The question is, who really makes international collaboration really work?”

SADC protocol

Nico Jooste, the senior director at the African Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation, and a strategic adviser to SARUA, spoke about the SADC protocol on regional cooperation.

The higher education section of the protocol has seven areas of cooperation – policy, basic education, intermediate education, higher education, research and development, lifelong learning and publishing-library resources.

At the higher education level, he said, regional mobility and access to universities for students from the region is a strong theme of protocol.

At the undergraduate level, member states agree to recommend to universities and other tertiary institutions in their countries to reserve at least 5% admission of students from SADC nations other than their own.

According to the protocol, to encourage mobility, member states agree to work towards the gradual relaxation and eventual elimination of immigration formalities that hinder free student and staff mobility at undergraduate level. Academic calendars are intended to be standardised.

“Although the protocol provides the legal policy of the framework for the cooperation of the regional higher education sector after ratification, it does not have the formal strength of a regional law,” said Jooste.

“The role of SARUA and universities is to revisit the higher education portion of the protocol; bringing universities to the table. SARUA will evaluate and assess the protocol to see what is missing, especially on the mobility of students and teachers in the region.”

He said it is essential that the existing framework for higher education protocol be aligned to the changing environment and strengthened to benefit the higher learning institutions in the region.

SARUA launched its virtual colloquium series on Higher Education Collaboration for Regional Development on May 19.

The purpose of the second colloquium was to consider the role of internationalisation in regional development, reflect on SADC education protocol and its role with regard to internationalisation within the SADC region, review the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on internationalisation in the SADC, assess the importance of South-South-North collaboration for internationalisation in the SADC, and reflect on current approaches to internationalisation.

The third colloquium was postponed until the end of June.

The fourth event in the series, ‘The Digital Transformation of Higher Education – SADC experiences’, was held on 2 June.