Building effective convening power for higher education in Africa

The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) and its precursor the Forum for Agricultural Resource Husbandry (FORUM) have in the last two decades focused on mobilizing universities to secure quality graduate training and research. This has entailed, among others, activities purposively designed to build convening power among higher education actors in Africa. Initially, the convening events were organized to bring together graduate students and their supervisors to peer-review their projects and thesis faculty supervised research. Gradually, this arrangement has transformed into a much broader conference in terms of the diversity of stakeholders in attendance, the scope and nature of business conducted and networking connections that foster new opportunities. The convening is now institutionalized as the RUFORUM Biennial Conference and African Higher Education Week. It is no longer a platform for project coordinators and graduate students supervisors to speak to themselves about their research project but a week-long convening event of these research teams with relevant stakeholders. The convening has among others (a) contributed to strengthening and/ or building collaborative engagements for sustaining higher education in Africa; (b) enhanced scholarly publishing; (c) facilitated peer-review, joint-regional learning and design of research in higher agricultural education and other key sectors; (d) served as a spring-board for partnerships and resource mobilization in support of higher education; and, (f) facilitated building the evidence-base that has linked universities to continental and national policy agencies. This paper presents a discussion on these achievements and gives the value-add of the Biennial Conferences in light of the RUFORUM agenda.