Stability at the helm is crucial for a healthy HE sector

The Ethiopian Ministry of Education has been undergoing rapid changes in its governance structure, focus areas, priorities and staffing over the past five years.

Given the pace of these changes, the ministry may be regarded, compared to other ministries, as one of the most volatile.

Unless the ministry achieves a healthy level of stability, it will face serious challenges in addressing the diverse expectations of the sector and the public at large.

Ethiopia’s education structure

Itself an area of continuous change, the current formal education structure in Ethiopia embodies the three areas of general, technical and vocational as well as higher education.

General education consists of eight years of primary education followed by four years of secondary education. A national examination is administered at the end of the last year of secondary school (Grade 12) to identify students who may continue to university.

While students who perform well may pursue tertiary education, those who perform below certain standards are expected to join a formal technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programme.

Five years back, the ministry administered higher education, general education and TVET as separate units or subsectors (in one ministry).

This allowed the ministry the opportunity to have a holistic view of the whole education sector and to provide guidance and coordination at the broader level.

Reflective of this consideration, the sector has been led through the ministry’s comprehensive five-year education sector development programmes that set defined goals and activities every five years for each of these subsectors.

Annual achievements were monitored, evaluated and published, based on the plans set. Among others, relevant data about achievements at each phase was published through the Education Statistics Annual Abstract (ESSA) which provided performance data and statistics about each sector, enhancing planning, decision-making and policy formulation.

Changes in the ministry’s structure

The growth of the higher education sector and the need to coordinate the development of science eventually led to the establishment of a separate ministry of science and higher education in 2018.

The powers and duties that were given earlier to the ministry of education for higher education and TVET and to the ministry of science and technology pertaining to science were transferred to the new ministry. The ministry of education was left to administer general, or school education, only.

The parallel existence of the ministry of education and the ministry of science and higher education was hailed as an indication of the special attention the new government gave to the education sector, despite the overall downsizing and reduction of the number of other ministries established for other sectors.

Although the ministry of science and higher education claimed to have brought science under its wing, there were serious challenges related to innovation, as this element was also incorporated in the ministry of technology and innovation, which was entrusted with a related responsibility.

Despite the warm welcome the new arrangement received across the higher education sector, it did not take too long for the ministry of science and higher education to be disbanded again and to be merged with the ministry of education in 2021 with responsibilities for general and higher education.

The purpose of this change and the reasons behind the change in structure still remain unclear.

A parallel development led the TVET sector to be administered by a separate ministry, the ministry of labour and social affairs.

Together with the changes in the way the ministry is organised, internal governance changes were introduced, which had their own impact on reorganising and administering previous ministry goals and tasks.

Little is known about the pros and cons of the new structural changes for the new ministries and their internal structures.

In particular, it is not clear how the alignment between the separate ministries and the various levels of education, which used to be under a single ministry, is maintained.

Three ministers in five years

In the past five years, three ministers have been at the helm of the ministry of education.

When the ministry of science and higher education was established in 2018, Hirut Woldemariam, a former professor of linguistics at Addis Ababa University, was made the minister.

She stayed in the position only until August 2020, when she was substituted by Dr Samuel Urkato, who served from August 2020 to October 2021.

The incumbent, Berhanu Nega, a university professor and leader of an opposition party, was appointed as the minister of education on 6 October 2021.

The change of higher officials over the past five years has also been reflected at the level of state minsters in charge of the specific education subsectors under the ministry.

For instance, the two state ministers under the incumbent minister, the state minister for higher education, and the state minister for general education, left the ministry, with new substitutes assigned only recently.

The possible negative impact of such frequent changes in terms of attaining the goals of the ministry and each subsector is predictable.

Change in focus areas

The change of structure and in higher officials has been accompanied by the changes in the ministry’s focus areas, which appear to be shifting from time to time.

What has been noticeable is that each minister paid attention to a particular area, but this focus was abandoned immediately after they left.

When the ministry was set up as the ministry of science and higher education in 2018, the first priority was developing a national 10-year Higher Education Development Strategy and five-year strategic plan commensurate with the new ministry’s responsibility.

The comprehensive plans developed by the ministry of science and higher education may be regarded as a continuation of the strategic directions set in the earlier 20-year plans of the education sector development programme, or ESDP, with its emphasis on higher education and science.

Accordingly, the higher education development plan focused on six major goals: ensuring quality, relevance, access and equity; institutional capacity building; increasing community participation and building scientific culture; improving research and publication and technology transfer; improving higher education infrastructure and facilities; and strengthening monitoring and an evaluation system of the higher education sector.

Relevant policy documents and guidelines were developed to translate the sectoral plans into operational elements.

Another significant and new initiative was the establishment of an advisory council comprising education experts and professionals from the diaspora and the country to assist the ministry’s efforts in generating ideas and resources.

When the minister changed in 2021, more attention was given to the development of new policies and regulations designed to assist the operational plans of the ministry, despite complaints about the speed at which the work was done.

The advisory council previously set up was made almost redundant with a new Council of Ethiopian Professors, which was set up with similar responsibilities and expectations.

There was also no clear indication about maintaining the earlier development plans of the ministry of science and higher education, given the effort to introduce new initiatives that were not incorporated in the plan.

Such initiatives included the flagship home-grown PhD programme that intended to produce 5,000 doctoral candidates using local universities as the primary actors, and the Annual Science Exhibition with award schemes set to encourage research productivity and innovation. Both of these plans have been abandoned with the change of the minister.

When Berhanu Nega became minister in 2021, he vowed to disentangle the influence of politics and ethnicity on the education sector in all their manifestations.

He started off with a human resource strategy that reassigned staff to new positions based on their credentials and through a selection process in which the ministers, themselves, were actively involved.

It is not clear how far he has been successful in achieving his ambitious plan, given the continued influence of politics in education.

Berhanu Nega is also known for implementing the national pass requirement set for school-leaving exams which has been a source of public concern in the past two years.

The development of new policies is an ongoing task but with less fervour as was the case during the time of the second minister. A case in point is the revision of the Education and Training Policy which was developed in 1994.

The previous advisory council of the ministry was also reinstated to continue, but with members drawn mainly from local institutions. The Ethiopian Council of Professors is no longer heard of.

However, in terms of the sector plan needed, it is unclear whether the ministry has developed one. If, at all, there is one, it has not yet been shared across the sector.

The implementation of policies developed under the previous ministers is also a missing element, since none of the current directions of the ministry appear to indicate such efforts.

Even the publication of ESSA, which included higher education data, has been discontinued since 2021.

The need for stability and continuity

As may be seen from the foregoing, the lack of stability in the ministry is having a significant impact on the focus, priority, consistency and continuity which are key elements of any successful organisation.

Change is inevitable and desirable. However, the various reforms undertaken in the sector and the gains made can only be meaningful if changes in the ministry are made on an incremental basis and the right people are allowed to stay in their positions for a reasonable period of time to help with the implementation of the ministry’s plans.

Stability requires, not only introducing one’s choices and priorities, but also conscious efforts to identify past achievements and the readiness to build on existing strengths. Changes in ministers should not necessarily mean starting everything anew.

Abandoning important initiatives without tangible reasons – and when their initiators are no longer with the ministry – can result in the loss of resources and proper direction.

Choosing to follow one’s own path without referring to previous plans and achievements is a costly exercise that poses a variety of unnecessary challenges in a resource-strained sector that requires clear direction and long-term planning.

Wondwosen Tamrat (PhD) is an associate professor and founding president of St Mary’s University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; a collaborating scholar of the Programme for Research on Private Higher Education at the State University of New York at Albany, United States; and coordinator of the private higher education sub-cluster of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa. He may be reached at preswond@smuc.edu.et or wondwosen@gmail.com. This is a commentary.