Reaching SDGs will require a collective commitment

For universities to play their part in achieving Africa’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), a collective commitment will be required.

Higher-education stakeholders highlighted some of the challenges facing African universities in contributing towards achieving SDGs at the 15th General Conference of the Association of African Universities (AAU) held in July.

Professor Juma Shabani, the director of the doctoral school at the University of Burundi and the former director of development, coordination and monitoring of UNESCO programmes with a special focus on Africa, told University World News that African universities contribute to the achievement of the SDGs through two major strategies, including training of high-level human resources in several priority areas of national development and the production of new knowledge through research carried out mainly at doctoral schools.

“The results of this research are transferred to industrial enterprises or start-ups that use them to develop new products or services,” Shabani said.

Room for improvement

However, Dr Birgit Schreiber, an associate member of the Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) programme at the membership organisation Universities South Africa, told University World News that African universities have not contributed sufficiently towards achieving SDGs.

“We need explicit markers by universities to set clear targets for SDGs,” said Schreiber, who is also a member of the Africa Centre for Transregional Research at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in Germany.

Dr Violet Makuku, a quality-assurance specialist and the project officer for the Harmonisation of African Higher Education Quality Assurance and Accreditation Initiative at the AAU, told University World News: “African universities could be contributing, but they should do more and there is a lot of room for improvement.

“African universities’ contribution towards SDGs depends on the way they implement curricula. More comprehensive research studies can continue to be done on this aspect to check what is really happening on the ground,” Makuku said.

“Those who could contribute more are institutions with degree programmes like agriculture extension, because, whether they like it or not, they have to work with communities to address the SDG [aimed at zero-hunger],” Makuku added.

Professor Peter Okebukola, president of the Global University Network for Innovation-Africa, told University World News the issue is not whether African universities are contributing toward SDGs, but rather the extent of their contributions.

“Overall, such contributions are far from impressive, and this may explain, at least in part, why many African nations are very far from attaining many of the SDGs,” Okebukola said.

Only 70 African universities located in 11 countries out of 54 African states have been ranked in at least one of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the 2021 edition of the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, which considers the extent that universities are advancing the SDGs.

Challenges

Makuku said the reaction of lecturers at AAU staff development workshops suggested that they know too little about SDGs.

“The teaching and learning of hard sciences, STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] disciplines and humanities can all be done in and with the communities but, in some institutions, the emphasis is more on theory, with very little to no reference to practical realities and real problems on the ground which are directly linked to the SDGs,” Makuku said.

Expanding on this, Okebukola said the challenges facing African universities are related to a deficit of human capacity as well as resource limitations. This, in turn, limits the kind of research and development which can bolster the output needed to support the attainment of the SDGs.

A 2021 study entitled ‘Sustainable Development Goals and Higher Education: Leaving many behind’, notes that “due to the decades of neglect of higher education […] on the African continent, much needs to be done to improve higher-education systems and institutions to be able to contribute to sustainable development”.

Makuku said African universities “should realise that the SDGs as well as the students they teach come from the communities”.

“It is, therefore, important for them to use real-life examples and situations from the communities – and the students’ experiences in those communities – for teaching and learning, research and community engagement so that students can already assist in resolving some of the issues well before they graduate.

“University personnel really need to use practical and pragmatic approaches to teaching and learning because that automatically leads to more engagement with the communities,” Makuku added.

She said it was imperative for departments and faculties to identify the SDGs that are directly and indirectly linked to what they offer. She also suggested that community engagement activities should carry more weight when considering promotion.

‘Massive expansion’

Schreiber said Africa’s growing youth population will require a massive expansion of the higher education system, which is currently insufficient.

“The SDG goal four is explicit about access; here we need to get better at enabling broader access, especially around women’s participation in higher education.”

To achieve this, the entire sector needs to expand, which SDG4 has not made explicit, she pointed out.

Schreiber, who is also the vice president of the International Association of Student Affairs and Services, said: “It [requires] a commitment to achieve SDGs at the collective level. Universities need to commit, for sure, but it is also national governments that need to make explicit commitments to SDGs.”

This, Schreiber believes, “will be much more effective if we have a collective vision” and that “all aspects of African development: finance, the environment, tourism, water, electricity, trade, and so on,” need to support education for achieving SDGs.

“Education is a reliable avenue to advance prosperity and we need all government, quasi-government and non-government bodies to work towards building a context that supports education,” she said.