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FEATURE
Institutions
of Higher Education in South Africa after the Mergers
     
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Regional
News
Africa
| AVU
Plans Expansion
African
Virtual University is expanding the sphere and content of its
operations to students in 22 of the continent’s countries
as part of a four-year partnership with Australia’s Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology University to deliver computer-science
degrees and diplomas. Working in conjunction with the University
of Dar es Salaam as the lead partner university and institutions
in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Ghana, the first classes commenced in February.
The expanded program expects an additional 800 enrollments in 2005.
Since
the online institution was conceived in 1997, 33 learning centers
have been established at partner universities in 17 African countries.
In 2003, 23,000 Africans took courses in programs such as journalism,
languages and accounting. Kuzvinetsa Peter Dzvimbo, AVU director,
said the goal for the next five years is to expand the network to
150 learning centers in 50 countries. The university hopes to have
four-year degree programs in computer science and business studies
available this year. AVU has also signed a US$3.5 million agreement
with the Australian government to offer business studies from a
center at Addis Ababa University.
The program eventually will be extended to other AVU institutions.
Curtin University of Technology
(Australia) will provide teaching skills and course materials for
the program.
—
The
Times Higher education Supplement
Feb. 27, 2004 |
BOTSWANA
Student
Disturbances Shutter University
For the second time in six months, the University of the North West has
been closed indefinitely. Student disturbances and fears for student safety
are behind the closure, according to school officials.
—
The
Reporter/Mmegi
May 5, 2004
KENYA
Union,
Government OK Salary Raises
The Universities Academic Staff Union and the government recently negotiated
a salary increase for public university lecturers that has officially
ended a four-month disruption to the school calendar, which started in
November 2003 (see WENR
January/February 2004). The raises, between 116.8 percent and 160.5 percent,
will be implemented over the next two years, from July 1 to June 30, 2006.
—
East
African Standard
May 4, 2004
LIBERIA
UL’s
Yearlong Closure Continues Despite Assurances
The University of Liberia, closed for over a year, was scheduled to reopen
May 31 after the government made available funds of US$400,000. Intense
efforts to have the university reopened followed student protests on the
main campus during a brief visit by head of state Gyude Bryant in March
(see March/April WENR).
The university is in need of major refurbishment due to the ravages of
the 14-year civil war, during which facilities at the campus were massively
looted and destroyed.
Despite assurances
the school would reopen May 31, classes failed to meet by the deadline
owing to a lack of power to print billing forms for more than 10,000 students
enrolled at the institution. Officials at the institution have also stated
that the necessary funds needed to reopen have not been made available
by either the government or scholarship donors, including external organizations,
campus-based student groups and individual students with unsettled amounts
of over a million dollars. A recent program to raise much-needed funds
to reopen the university was poorly attended, with no more than US$500
raised in cash and pledges. The financial crisis has been exasperated
by student groups who say that the proposed tuition is unreasonable and
impossible to meet.
—
The NEWS
June 4, 2004
NIGERIA
| African
Universities Scrutinize GATS
University
officials met in April at an Accra, Ghana, conference organized
by the Association of African Universities
(AAU) and UNESCO to examine the implications of the General Agreement
of Trade in Services (GATS) for African higher education.
The
secretary-general of AAU, Akilagpa Sawyer, said African institutions
of higher education and governments have yet to respond effectively
to the World Trade Organization (WTO)-backed changes that would
see education treated as a commodity under WTO deregulation. Signatories
to GATS will be expected to apply rules that regulate international
trade to their educational systems, i.e. liberalize the education
sector, free up competition among service providers and offer unimpeded
access to international markets. The inclusion of education as a
tradable service under GATS, and the apparent haste with which some
Western countries want to co-opt developing countries, raised a
lot of concern in Accra. There were warnings that developing countries
appeared largely ignorant about the impact of the “open-door
commercial education policy” on their weak, run-down and heavily
subsidized public educational systems.
According
to AAU, many countries in Africa are unlikely to become education-exporting
countries. However, by signing GATS, they will have to open their
domestic higher education markets to foreign providers. Detractors
say GATS is being forced upon them by richer nations eager to increase
their education-export industries, with little concern for the quality
and growth of the target markets they would be serving. Proponents
say the agreement will provide new opportunities and benefits by
building capacity through cooperative linkages and partnerships
for institutions of higher education that are currently underfinanced,
poorly staffed and struggling to adapt to World Bank and International
Monetary Fund-backed reforms.
As
of March, only 41 of the 146 WTO-member countries had submitted
offers to provide access to their domestic education markets. None
of these offers is from Africa. The Accra Declaration on GATS
and the Internationalization of Higher Education in Africa
can be found HERE.
—
UN
Integrated Regional Information Networks
April 29, 2004
|
New Examination
Board Creates Tension
The West African Examination
Council (WAEC) and the National Examinations Council are the two recognized
exam boards in Nigeria, and now a third is attempting to enter the arena.
The Lagos State Executive Council recently approved the establishment
of the Lagos State Examination Board (LSEB), which would replace the two
existing bodies at the state level in Lagos.
In response,
the federal government has said it would reject any alternative body and
that it and all federal universities in Lagos will refuse to recognize
the state-level certification from LSEB. The move is a result of continued
dissatisfaction with WAEC examinations, which have been plagued by inefficiencies,
leakages, results cancellations, cheating and forgeries. To ameliorate
some of these problems, WAEC announced in 2003 that it would replace its
statement of results with a photo-embossed certificate (see WENR
September/October 2003), and that results would be available to students
online within 90 days of the exam.
—
Vanguard
March 11, 2004
NUC Recognizes
Nigeria’s 54th University
The National Universities
Commission (NUC) officially recognized the Gombe State University
in May. A statement from the commission said the university becomes the
54th university in Nigeria and the 21st state-run university.
The first
phase of development will introduce the faculties of arts and social science,
and education and science, while the second phase will develop the faculties
of agriculture, law and environmental science.
—
Daily
Trust
May 11, 2004
SIERRA LEONE
Fourah
Bay College Offers Hope for Future
Relative calm has returned to Sierra Leone after the country’s decade-long
civil war officially ended in 2002. During the rebel invasion of Freetown
in 1999, the Fourah Bay College campus
of the University of Sierra Leone was seized, and half of the buildings
were razed before the rebels swept into the nation’s capital. As
Freetown was about to fall, a force of Nigerian peacekeepers seized the
campus and began shelling the city. Today, throughout Freetown there are
reminders of the war. But amid the ashes, the continent’s oldest
university remains a beacon of hope.
The university’s
recovery is remarkable. Even during the war, Fourah Bay managed to double
its undergraduate enrollment to approximately 2,000. Despite steep fees
of more than US$3,000 a year for foreign students, students trickled in
from nearby Anglophone countries, especially Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia.
Enrollment is expected to rise to 3,000 by 2006. Graduate numbers are
also rising steadily.
The university
is widely recognized for its academic excellence, a reputation almost
unrivaled on the continent. Fourah Bay College was founded in 1827 —
two years before South Africa’s first university and well over a
century before the next university in West Africa. Until 1968, when it
became part of the largest campus of the University of Sierra Leone, Fourah
Bay was a far-flung college of Britain’s University
of Durham.
According
to faculty, new teachers remain committed to maintaining the standards
set by Durham University. The University of Sierra Leone was not untouched
by the country’s implosion. The war put an end to a lucrative exchange
program with Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Chronic poverty has hit many
students, 70 percent of whom pay their own fees. And many lecturers who
fled the country during the war have not returned. However, the university’s
revival and its strong tradition in the sciences, history, modern languages
and, more recently, political science, provides inspiration for the country’s
future.
—
The Guardian
May 11, 2004
SOUTH AFRICA
10 of
28 MBA Providers Considered Substandard
The Council for Higher Education released
in May the results of its two-year evaluation of the country’s master’s
degrees in business administration. Evaluating 37 programs at 28 institutions,
the council re-accredited only six institutions, gave 12 conditional re-accreditation
and withdrew accreditation from 10 institutions.
The accreditation
process was launched as a reaction to alarm at the proliferation of such
programs. Among the 10 MBA programs that met less than 15 percent of the
council’s minimum standards were those of top public institutions,
including the University of Natal’s
School of Business. Most, however, were small, private institutions. The
fully accredited institutions are the University
of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science, Wits
Business School, University of
Stellenbosch’s Graduate School of Business, University
of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, University
of South Africa’s Graduate School of Business Leadership and
the University of Pretoria’s
Graduate School of Management.
—
BuaNews
May 21, 2004
TOGO
University
of Lome Closes Through May, Students Boycott Exams
The main university of this small, West African country was closed at
the end of April after students and police clashed violently over unpaid
stipends. Students and lecturers at the university have complained for
several years about overcrowding. The university, until January the only
one in Togo (see WENR
January/February 2004), was built to accommodate 6,000 students, but now
has 14,000.
Each year,
every student in Togo is supposed to receive a stipend of US$108, a total
of US$1.6 million in grants to 15,000 students. Student protesters say
they have not received the stipend since 2001. University Vice Chancellor
Nicoue Gyibor condemned the violence and urged the students to give the
government time to sort out the problems. He attributed the university’s
woes to Togo’s overall economic plight, which he blamed on the withholding
of donor aid for the last decade by the European Union because of President
Gnassingbé Eyadéma’s poor record on democracy and
human rights. The university reopened in June, however the students have
refused to sit their end of term exams until several student leaders jailed
after the earlier disturbances are released.
—
The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 5, 2004
ZAMBIA
Scottish
E-Learning School Enters Zambian Market
Interactive University
(IU), an Edinburgh e-learning company connected to Heriot-Watt,
has entered the African market after signing its first local partnering
agreement in the region. The deal with the Zambian Institute of Capacity
Building (Zicab) will result in the marketing recruitment and distribution
of Scottish courses throughout Zambia, focusing initially on Heriot-Watt’s
management program and the University
of Stirling’s management MBA. Zicab is a privately-managed education
and development agency that trains large numbers of people in both the
public and private sectors of the Zambian economy. The program is the
first of its kind in the country.
The announcement
comes hot on the heels of IU’s 2003 deal with Singapore’s
Nanyang Institute of Management, which is expected to attract more than
1,500 new students over the next three years. That deal followed the award
of a contract earlier in 2003 to supply business courses to Long Way College
in Harbing, China, and agreements with universities in Beijing, Nanjing
and Shanghai.
—
The Scotsman
Jan. 20, 2004
ZIMBABWE
Racism
Alleged in Government Crackdown
The Zimbabwe government
closed 45 private schools in early May, claiming they were raising fees
without government approval to exclude blacks. Some schools had proposed
fee increases of 50 percent; inflation is 580 percent.
Although
the government relented a few days later and gave permission for the majority
of the schools to reopen after setting their fees, principals reportedly
were still being picked up by police on fee-related allegations. Total
school attendance in 2003 fell 60 percent in Zimbabwe.
—
The Herald
May 7, 2004
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