Plans to expand higher education with five new universities

After laying the foundation stone of the Université d’Odienné, Côte d’Ivoire’s Prime Minister, Robert Beugré Mambé, announced plans for the creation of four more new universities after 2025.

The planned universities will be located in Adiaké, Abengourou, Dabou and Daoukro, reported All Africa.

The first phase of Odienné University, in north-west Côte d’Ivoire, will take 24 months to complete, when it will be ready for its first students, reported All Africa.

It will be built on 402ha at a cost of 114.7 billion FCFA (about US$195.5 million). It will specialise in sciences and technologies, biological sciences, medicine, agro-industry and dietary technology; and it will include an institute of veterinary sciences and a business and management school.

According to Professor Adama Diawara, the minister of higher education and scientific research, the new institutions will participate in local development, with their courses compatible with the economic and social potentialities of their regions, reported All Africa.

The decision to create the new universities follows Diawara’s reform in 2023 aimed at concentrating higher education on teaching students more practical disciplines and skills to fulfil the country’s employment and industrial needs, and cutting the high graduate unemployment and under-employment rates.

According to a report in Le Monde, about 40,000 students graduate from the public and private higher education institutions each year, but only 31.7% will find employment after their studies.

The student population grows each year by 6.3%, nearly 300,000, but the job market is unable to absorb such numbers, reported Le Monde; and more than half work in posts below their level of qualifications, according to Coulibaly Djakalidja, director of Oipdes, the Observatory of Professional Integration of Higher Education Graduates.

This is a gulf the authorities are attempting to close by tightening up selection and adjusting courses to fit the needs of businesses, reported Le Monde.

Diawara’s 2023 reform emphasised “more practical, less theory”; and the public universities are “now governed and managed like companies”, Le Monde reported Djakalidja as saying.

At the Odienné stone-laying ceremony on 3 August, Beugré Mambé said its construction was of extreme importance, because “Odienné is going to change completely”.

He praised President Alassane Ouattara who, he said, “has understood that, if we want to advance, we must place special emphasis on the education of our children … to produce men and women transformed by knowledge”. — Compiled by Jane Marshall.

This article is drawn from local media. University World News cannot vouch for the accuracy of the original reports.