Strengthening higher education for socio-economic development in Africa

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have the responsibility of building the human capital required to drive socio-economic growth in many countries. It is the mandate of HEIs to carry out training, research, and innovation for development. The right of access to higher education is described in UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966, Article 13, that states that “higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.” In Europe, Article 2 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1950, obliges all signatory parties to guarantee the right to education. In Africa, tertiary education is still at its infancy unlike primary and secondary school education. The number of persons with PhD is low and brain drain is a reality in most countries. Despite a surge in the number of students in Tertiary Education institutions, the number of members of staff that hold a PhD degree is low, teaching infrastructures are old and overcrowded and the capacity to carry out cutting edge research is a problem. Besides universities are being accused of producing graduates that do not match the needs of the industry. To counter these problems, universities are urged to reengineer their training to ensure enhanced access to quality and relevant education. Student mobility and adequate funding should play a major role in the reengineering process. Research and innovation should increasingly become an integral part of postgraduate training programmes particularly in fields that are priority to specific country programmes or regional agendas. This should be strengthened by building in systems that encourage intellectual property rights and that motivate staff. Commercialization of research outputs and dissemination using the relevant communication channels is critical if the benefits of the research will trickle down to communities and industries. More importantly, HEIs should become more entrepreneurial through establishment of programmes that support job creation. This could be through curricula review to embed business training courses in all programmes. This can be twinned with establishment of business incubation centres for nurturing graduate business start-up companies. Dependency on government capitation should decrease by embracing diverse mechanisms of resource mobilization such as establishment of spin off companies and industrial parks. The problems of Africa need a local solution and this can only be realized if HEIs primarily deliver on their core mandates of training, research, and innovation for development.