PhD training: What calibre of graduates does Africa want?

Doctoral training in Africa faces multiple challenges to the extent that the universities cannot produce sufficient experts to contribute to research output, innovations and economic and scientific growth, according to four Nigerian academics who explored completion issues PhD candidates on the continent have.

In the study, ‘Exploring perspectives: A scoping review of the challenges facing doctoral training in Africa’, published on 6 September 2024 in the Springer journal Higher Education, the researchers say there had been study delays, longer completion times and high attrition rates among PhD candidates at most African universities.

“Low research training capacity and productivity also pose challenges that impair completion and the contribution of academic knowledge of PhD candidates in African universities,” said lead investigator Dr Oluwatomilayo Omoya, an associate lecturer of health sciences at Flinders University in Australia, and Dr Olumide Odeyemi, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia.

The other researchers involved in the study are two scholars from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria: Dr Udeme Samuel Jacob, a special education lecturer, and his associate, Omowale Odeyemi, a health sciences lecturer.

To arrive at these conclusions, the team reviewed 51 recent studies exploring the perspectives of candidates pursuing or completing PhDs at African universities. The study concentrated primarily on five themes: the social and demographic characteristics of the doctoral students, funding, resources and training, supervision experiences, and coping mechanisms.

PhD students must fund themselves

The researchers found that funding constraints and the limited sustainability of the programmes over the medium and long term were impacting on PhD training. In most cases, PhD students in Africa are required to contribute to their studies or seek funding and scholarships.

Analysing the characteristics of the African PhD students, the researchers found that they are about 45 years old in most countries except South Africa, where the percentage of PhD students under 30 years old was higher among white people than their black counterparts, a factor attributed to economic considerations.

In this regard, the researchers argue that there is a need for resource interventions for PhD candidates in Africa, given that many are older and juggle their studies with family and work commitments.

Highlighting the problem in Kenya, Professor Peter Barasa, the vice-chancellor of Alupe University, and Professor Carolyne Omulando, the deputy vice-chancellor of academic affairs at the Open University of Kenya, in a study commissioned by the British Council and the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) several years ago pointed out that many employers of PhD students in Kenya do not provide funded leave, thus making it hard for students to concentrate on their studies. This is the case in most African countries.

Barasa and Omulando noted that most PhD students were also unable to complete their studies within three years because of work overload for their supervisors and limited research facilities. Subsequently, the new scoping review raises a red flag that PhD training at African universities is not working as expected, even though the African Union aims to produce 100,000 PhDs in the next 10 years. In effect, Africa is a battleground for minting many PhD graduates against heavy odds.

Initiatives set to boost PhD numbers

Amid efforts to strengthen science and technology capability in Sub-Saharan Africa, a World Bank initiative, the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering, and Technology (PASET) has been working through various centres of excellence to produce 10,000 PhD graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in the past 10 years.

More recently, 23 public universities in Sub-Saharan Africa that are members of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) have partnered with the Mastercard Foundation, projecting to produce 1,000 PhD graduates each year. ARUA’s recently retired secretary general, Professor Ernest Aryeetey, expected the partnership to produce 7,000 PhD graduates in the next 10 years.

Since 2011, the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) has been helping to produce the next generation of competitive PhD graduates for Africa. As of July 2023, 145 CARTA-supported PhD fellows have graduated from the programme, and 78 are in the pipeline.

These efforts and other small-scale PhD collaborations are commendable. However, the number of PhD students under ARUA, PASET, and other programmes that have graduated or dropped out in the past 10 years will tell how successful those initiatives are in producing PhDs for Africa. One of the critical challenges of PhD programmes in African countries where students are supported by international collaborations or sponsor themselves is that many students do not finish on time.

Countless problems hamper students

For instance, Dr Bekele Workie Ayele, a lecturer in curriculum and instruction at Kotebe Metropolitan University in Addis Ababa, said that, at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, ARUA PhD candidates encounter problems related to poor facilities and a shortage of resources such as laboratories, libraries and learning materials. They also experience a lack of working space and inadequate supervision. Addis Ababa University is a member of the ARUA fraternity.

Similar problems related to the incompletion of studies by ARUA-PhD-supported students have been cited at the University of Rwanda, and lower graduation rates have also been reported at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

According to Dr Agnes Lutomiah, a research fellow at the Nairobi-based African Centre for Technology Studies, ARUA and other PhD programmes at African universities suffer from inadequately qualified supervisors, according to a research report on collaborative PhD programmes the Human Sciences Research Council produced for ARUA in 2022. “This lack of supervisory capacity makes it difficult for enrolled PhD candidates to complete their studies as, in some cases, students rely on remote supervision.”

However, beyond the personal challenges older postgraduate students face in Africa, the latest study highlights the issue of supervisor-candidate relationships in circumstances where the postgraduate training professors are overloaded with teaching or are too few to cope with the number of PhD students.

Women face more barriers

For instance, in 2019 in Kenya, the university education regulator, the Commission for Higher Education, had to drop the decision to have all lecturers at public universities acquire PhDs because of the lack of supervisors while, much earlier, a similar fate had occurred at Makerere University in Uganda.

The current review of PhD training in Africa also points out that the continent has many socio-cultural values and norms that impact on people’s learning experiences, especially women. While there has been notable progress in women obtaining PhDs in Africa, many cultural barriers that hinder women’s academics during their PhD journeys still exist, according to the study.

Citing a British Council and DAAD report that examined the challenges of increasing PhD graduates in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa, the researchers stress that, although the number of women enrolling in PhD programmes in those countries is increasing, the attrition rate is significantly higher compared to men.

Reporting on experiences of African women doctoral students in STEM disciplines in South African universities in 2023, Dr Zamambo Mkhize, a senior lecturer in gender studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said most women PhD candidates face challenges based on their racial and gendered identities. In an article, Mkhize said African women remain highly under-represented.

Mkhize stressed that, although African women have made inroads into male-dominated academic fields, they still face epistemic injustice, marginalisation, presumed incompetence, intellectual inferiority, and cognitive dissonance. “To most people, they are just women; what do they know?” Mkhize wrote.

PhD programmes need reform

What is clear is that, although the demand to produce PhD holders in Africa is increasing, training issues must be addressed to produce high-quality graduates.

Far from addressing low funding issues, personal life challenges, and other dynamics contributing to attrition and non-completion of studies, African universities face problems related to the structure, policies, plans for growth, relevance, and reform of their PhD programmes.

Whereas, the standard model of awarding a PhD in most African universities is based on student research and writing a thesis under the supervision of academics, other approaches, such as doctoral degrees obtained by publication, fieldwork, or for careers in industry and the professions, are only in the experimental stages.

According to Professor Cheryl de la Rey, a South African academic currently the vice-chancellor of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the difference is that professional doctorates are partly based on research, with the rest comprised of courses and practice-based work. However, some stakeholders in African higher education regard this as a lower version of the traditional PhD.

In this context, African PhD training is at a crossroads, considering that some African countries do not even have a national agenda or budget for PhD training and research. Much of the support is left to partnerships such as ARUA, PASET and CARTA, while most students sponsor themselves.

To date, it is hard to tell how many PhD candidates graduate from African universities annually because of the high attrition rates. Subsequently, the journey to producing 100,000 PhD graduates in the next 10 years is likely to be rocky and too tiring for a continent whose PhD training is characterised by limited funding, staffing challenges, low graduation rates, and reliant on collaborating agencies.