The Foundation Partnership
to Strengthen African Universities

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Leaders of the foundation partnership are mindful of these concerns and the challenges they pose, which helps to shape their grantmaking. Africa’s need to connect with and integrate global knowledge and learning also helps explain why the foundations have chosen to concentrate so heavily on improving higher education in the countries in which they work: many in Africa, as well as in the U.S., are convinced that the continent’s universities offer the best hope of combining an understanding of internal problems with knowledge culled from around the world to create targeted and effective responses to problems ranging from the spread of HIV/AIDS to how to create models of sustainable development.

To meet the needs, a number of countries in the region have started making significant changes to their higher education systems, which include new methods of financing, new modes of governance, the creation of evaluation and accreditation mechanisms, curriculum reforms and technological innovations. As Raoul Davion, a program officer at the MacArthur Foundation says, “As universities in Africa continue to grow as centers of excellence, opportunities for regularizing and formalizing exchanges between them will increase, enabling them to deepen their specialization in particular areas.” However, progress has been uneven so far, giving rise to sharp contrasts between as well as within higher education systems in different countries.

One developing success story, though, can be found at the University of Dar es Salaam, where efforts to strengthen and improve the institution also led to gains in the area of gender equity. “As part of its institutional transformation program, the University of Dar es Salaam also established a Gender Dimension Programme Committee to pay attention to gender issues beyond the admission of more women students, including those environmental factors that affect retention, educational achievement and general well-being,” explains Fenella Mukangara, Gender Programme Coordinator at the university. This led to a $1 million, three-year grant from Carnegie Corporation to implement a scholarship program for undergraduate women as part of the Corporation’s contribution to the Foundation Partnership. “The real challenge is for us to continue to build on the progress we’ve made so far,” says Mukangara. “It’s not enough to just increase women’s enrollment. We have to work on making the campus a more gender equitable place and also make sure that women can afford to continue to come here.”

Modes of Operation
A key principle of the foundation partnership is the recognition that, in some respects, the differences among African universities—especially in terms of organization, operation, culture and interests—are mirrored by the differences among the collaborating foundations. Therefore, each foundation participating in the partnership provides support for higher education institutions through their traditional methods and in the country or countries where they have chosen to work. To date, partnership activities have focused on six sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. While the nature of the activities being supported often varies, an important concern of all four foundations is helping to establish regional and inter-country education leadership links.

Currently, the criteria for selecting universities to receive support through the foundation partnership include:

• Being located in a country undergoing systemic public policy reform.
• Supporting innovation—such as institutional transformation, curriculum review and being responsive to community concerns—that will better position the institutions to meet the specific needs of their countries.
• Engaging in a strategic planning process—including creating links with stakeholders in government, the private sector and wider society—in which a key element is a commitment to helping to build national capacity for social and economic development.
• Having creative, broad-based institutional leadership.

“The core functions of the partnership include grantmaking by individual foundations and the dissemination of public information on the importance of higher education for Africa’s development,” says Andrea Johnson, a Carnegie Corporation IDP program officer. She explains that each partnership member works directly with institutions of higher education in Africa, while also continuing to support other educational activities under its specific thematic programs.

To focus attention on improving higher education in Africa, the partnership shares information and coordinates its activities with that of other international agencies, thus leveraging its work with critical players in the future of higher education on the continent. Joint funder-partner university meetings are also held to promote interaction between two groups. Nico Cloete, director of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation in South Africa said, of the last meeting in Accra, Ghana that “the increased socialization between . . . funders and non-funders was a positive development.”

Next page: Making the partnership work has required a sustained effort that actively involves staff at each of the four foundations.

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