THE announcement Thursday by the World Bank that it wished to lay more emphasis on tertiary education in the African continent, at the on-going 13 General Conference of the Association of African Universities (AAU) in Libreville, Gabon, has been described as a major paradigm shift by various vice chancellors and professors in attendance.
When Ritva Reinikka, the Finnish World Bank's Africa Region's Director of Human Development took the floor to announce the bank's decision to establish 15 Centres of Excellence in selected universities across West and Central Africa, which include Nigeria, Benin Republic, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal and Togo, some Nigerian professors however, expressed cautious optimism.
According to Reinikka, the objective of the soon-to-be-launched project is to promote regional specialisation among participating universities in areas that address specific common regional development challenges. The initiative will also strengthen the capacities of the participating institutions to "deliver high quality training and applied research" and would also "meet the demand for skills required for Africa's development, such as the extractive industries."
The project, anchored on the bank's new "Learning for All" policy, will focus on strengthening between seven and 10 existing universities in West and Central Africa, for which $8 million will be provided for each of the 15 centres. Some institutions will be qualified to have two of such centres. The institutions will be competitively selected, based on the criteria benchmarked to best international practices.
The qualifying universities would be required to strengthen post graduate proprammes for a regional students' body; offer specialised courses for industry professionals in the region; establish a regional faculty and attract additional top-level faculty. They would also provide learning resources, laboratories and minor rehabilitation of existing facilities.
Besides, they would be mandated to establish linkages with companies, government agencies and research centres for workplace learning, input into curricula, consultancies and joint research.
The envisaged beneficiaries will include students in supported institutions and their partner institutions, who will benefit from quality research based education in high demand areas; companies, governmental organisations that partner with the envisaged centres, and both academic and non-academic staff of the benefitting institutions.
Reinikka also revealed that the bank's new focus on higher education in Africa would, in general terms, be anchored on five main areas: quality and standards; courses that are relevant to Africa's needs in real terms; transparent system of governance, especially in filling academic positions; standards and evolution of private universities; funding of public universities; and the ways through which soft loans could be granted to students from low income families to study in universities.
Interestingly, the bank had, in the 1990s, told African governments to pay more attention to basic education and focus less on the tertiary level. This had been a contentious issue between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the bank at several fora over the years, where the union directly accused the bank of deliberately pursuing policies to weaken Nigeria's and by extension, Africa's development.
The immediate past Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Prof. Olufemi Bamiro, who was one of those that commented on Reinikka's paper, described the bank's change of policy as a "drastic" but "positive" one. He said: "This is a major paradigm shift by the World Bank. I was at a meeting of African Vice Chancellors in Harare (Zimbabwe) in the 1990s when the World Bank made a presentation that Africa should lay less emphasis on higher education. But if this bank is now asking us to take tertiary education more seriously, it is a welcome development." But the immediate past Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin and former President of the AAU, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede told the audience that the bank's shift in policy should be taken with caution.
According to him, the bank's decision to establish centres of excellence would only make sense if it aligns with what African institutions are currently engaged in. "We already have centres of excellence in some African universities doing some work. I believe that the World Bank's new project will only make sense if it will promote what is already on ground and not to come with an entirely new thing that would deviate from what we are doing. I am saying this because African governments tend to listen more to the bank than to us (academics)."
The Guardian