by Ambika Kapur

As we send more of the world’s young people to school, growing numbers of students are knocking at the doors of their country’s universities and colleges, hoping for a chance to further their education. In a number of African countries, some of the help these students need to realize their dreams may be on the way from a pathbreaking four-foundation partnership.

Imagine a university without an adequate supply of books. Imagine a university without Internet access. Imagine a higher education system where institutions are not ranked by the quality of their teachers, but by their ability to provide the resources to help students get online. Imagine a system of higher education that admits women only grudgingly, either as faculty or as students.

All too often, in sub-Saharan Africa, conditions such as these are not the worst-case-scenarios of imagination but the unfortunate reality for those seeking higher education. Narciso Matos, chair of Carnegie Corporation’s International Development Program (IDP), says “This is a critical problem for the nations of the region, for their people and for the future of both; if education and development go hand-in-hand, then expanding educational opportunities and resources must be seen as a key component of efforts to improve the lives of men and women across the African continent.”

In the past decade many African universities have come to this same conclusion and have begun to rethink their missions and redesign their institutions. Seeing these developments taking place, four American foundations, the Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations, along with Carnegie Corporation of New York, decided the time was right to lead an initiative aimed at improving higher education institutions in a number of sub-Saharan African countries. The Partnership to Strengthen African Universities, officially launched in April 2000, represents a belief in the importance and viability of higher education in Africa, and a mechanism to provide real assistance to its renaissance. It is also premised on an assessment that, at this junction, a number of African countries are primed for real change, have the stability for long-term reform, and are intent on finding ways of turning their challenges into opportunities.

In announcing the effort, the leaders of the four institutions, Vartan Gregorian of Carnegie Corporation of New York, Susan Berresford of the Ford Foundation, Gordan Conway of the Rockefeller Foundation and Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation, said the decision to work together to enhance and expand their educational grantmaking in Africa was based upon two important trends. First, a significant number of sub-Saharan nations are implementing democratic and economic reforms that make them promising venues for the development of education. Second, many higher education institutions in Africa are battling difficult circumstances brought on by years of neglect and isolation, along with the new pressures created by the reforms themselves.

The partnership was forged to support efforts, many already underway, by leaders of African universities and academic associations to expand and improve the education available to the next generation of African leaders. An important element of the partnership activities is that the four foundations share information and seek to develop common approaches as they expand support that each already provides to universities on the continent.

The partnership represents a new and different view of African higher education on the part of international donor agencies and foundations. Until recently, they often overlooked Africa’s increasingly crumbling universities out of a belief that more could be accomplished by supporting primary and secondary schools in a region where only half the population is literate. A recent report by an international committee convened jointly by the World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise, concludes that mistakes have been made. “Narrow and, in our view, misleading economic analysis has contributed to the view that public investment in universities and colleges brings meager returns compared to investment in primary and secondary schools,” states the report. Matos believes that the report will contribute to a more balanced perspective about how much African universities have to contribute to the progress and development of African nations, on many levels. “Strong African universities can play a role in protecting basic freedoms, enhancing intellectual life and informing policymaking,” he says.

Matos, who served for four years as secretary general of the Association of African Universities before joining the Corporation, adds that “There is a realization now that you need university- trained personnel to assist in economic development. Despite more innovative leadership at a few African universities,” he continues, “decades of economic decline, numerous wars across the continent and an enrollment explosion have left African education in a grim state. Enrollment in sub-Saharan Africa is only 3.5 percent of the college-age population, the lowest of any region in the world.”

Along with this new focus on higher education in Africa, funders are increasingly mindful ofglobalization and the need for universities across the world to meet the challenges it brings. Ahmed Bawa, program officer in the Ford Foundation’s program in Southern Africa, says that universities in sub-Saharan Africa are recognizing that the creation of knowledge, the dissemination of research and even teaching are no longer self-contained activities, but must draw on resources and information from all over the world. This presents a unique challenge for African universities, which often do not have access to important sources of new data and discoveries, such as academic journals or the Internet. “The challenge,” Bawa says, “is how to get knowledge that may have been produced anywhere in the world to educators, scientists and researchers in Africa, where it can be used effectively in a variety of problem-solving contexts. There is, therefore, a clear need for the internationalization of Africa’s higher education.”

Next page: Leaders of the foundation partnership are mindful of these concerns and the challenges they pose, which helps to shape their grantmaking.

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