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Several regional initiatives allied with increasing digitalisation have led to greater student and graduate mobility and boosted knowledge production across East Africa, says Dr James Jowi, the deputy executive secretary of the East African Kiswahili Commission, the former principal education officer of the East African Community and a board member of the African Network for Internationalisation of Education, or ANIE.
Against a background of massification, which has led to the number of students outpacing growth in the numbers of academic staff at overstretched universities, the EAC has stepped in with a series of programmes seeking to improve efficiency within, and capacity across, the higher education sector in East Africa.
Jowi notes there has been “a drive to promote mutual recognition of qualifications within the region, which has entailed negotiations around benchmarking quality standards for various professions with the aim of facilitating the movement of students, graduates and staff within the EAC”.
He said: “Agreements have been reached for engineers, architects, veterinarians, accountants and – after some debate about which judicial bodies had the authority to sign – lawyers.”
Promoting mobility
Through these agreements, professionals who have qualified in one EAC country can practise anywhere in the regional bloc. “Mutual recognition of professional qualifications has facilitated the mobility of professionals within the region,” said Jowi, who is a founder and leader of the African Network for Internationalization of Education (ANIE).
The mutual recognition of professional qualifications has also promoted the mobility of students and academic staff across the region.
Another interesting development has been the increased recognition and use of Kiswahili across the EAC. Kiswahili, which is one of the most widely spoken African languages, is now being developed as an official language of the regional bloc.
“African languages need to be preserved as an integral aspect of cultural identity on the continent,” Jowi said. He argues that they should also be used widely in academic and intellectual life. In this context, Jowi notes that the development of Kiswahili as a common official language across the EAC has already halted a decline in the use of Kiswahili in universities.
Digital technologies
Another encouraging development is the increasing adoption of digital technologies in teaching and learning in universities in East Africa. “There is great potential for pedagogical innovations in relation to how lessons are delivered and knowledge is imparted, and in relation to how students are evaluated. The emergence of digitalisation and new technologies has been greeted with increasing enthusiasm among several African academics and researchers,” Jowi said.
“Young African scholars can now participate in international academic debates through various online platforms, which would have otherwise been unaffordable due to the cost of travel.”
The adoption of digital technologies has facilitated more transnational exchanges among scholars on the continent and among scholars from Africa and other parts of the world. However, there is still much unrealised potential.
“Generally, the higher education sector has been relatively slow in deploying the new technologies to support its main activities, such as teaching, learning and research,” said Jowi, citing the high costs involved and the need for large-scale capacity-building as challenges that must be addressed.
Technical and vocational training
In the meantime, teachers “who may have hundreds of students in their classes – and may be required to mark hundreds of scripts … continue to assess via pen-and-paper examinations undertaken in large halls, which are then marked by hand”.
In addition, Jowi notes, many professors and lecturers at the public institutions have failed to embrace “transformations in pedagogy and in their fields” and are thus unable “to address the actual challenges that society is facing and to which universities need to be responsive”.
In this context, he describes how young people are increasingly choosing to attend technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges rather than universities “so that they can exploit the relatively close relationship between these colleges and the job market”. He said those with TVET skills “are more likely to find work and will probably earn more than university graduates”.
In response, and to make university education more relevant and efficient, higher education institutions in the region should “tap into and utilise their students’ skills and capacity to innovate and provide solutions”.
Outdated assessment system
Jowi said: “I think the universities and the older generation at these institutions need to take radical action and acknowledge and leverage the know-how and capacity of the younger generation who have learned to use and manipulate digital devices … from an early age.”
Jowi advises that there is a need “to disrupt the present old-school system of assessment, which would entail training academic staff to engage with teaching, learning and assessment in new, digital ways”.
In addition, he argues that new, more relevant approaches to learning could be adopted, including by helping students to source much of the content and knowledge that is required for their studies online.
Noting the damaging impacts of massification on knowledge production in the region during the 2000s, Jowi describes how academics now face “major” teaching workloads which deprive them of the time they need for research and knowledge generation.
Sustainable African journals
The resulting lack of capacity in African knowledge-production has been exacerbated by discrimination within the international literature which generally “fails to acknowledge the value of citing local case studies in a paper on an African situation”.
In response, Jowi advocates for “a drive to develop strong, sustainable African journals in a number of thematic and subject areas which would be able to profile the work of the young scholars and promote it internationally”.
The establishment of such journals would also support the work of several new centres of excellence in research and training that have been established with the support of the EAC at universities across the region.
“A few of them provide high-level training and capacity-building for research in the various fields, including in health; information and communications technologies (ICTs); environmental issues; technical and vocational education and training; engineering; and entrepreneurship. The centres of excellence on health include one on kidney research in Nairobi; there is one concerned with heart diseases in Uganda; and there is one on nutrition being established in Burundi. There are also centres focused on agriculture – for example, at Egerton University in Kenya – and a number focused on technical and vocational training, including one at Moi University providing training for the textile sector.”
Capacity-building in key sectors
“Meanwhile, countries are taking the lead in relation to capacity-building in key sectors which have been identified as priorities for development. So, Rwanda is taking the lead on ICTs; Kenya is taking the lead on automotive manufacture; and Tanzania is taking a lead in relation to the blue economy.”
In tandem with the drive to promote mutual recognition of qualifications within the region, the establishment of these centres alongside a number of accompanying scholarships has fostered the mobility of professionals, academics and students across the region, Jowi said.
“Now, Kenyan students commonly study in Uganda and vice versa, which represents a shift from the days when students in the region only conceived of studying abroad in terms of finding a university place in Europe, the United States or South Africa,” he said.
This article is based on an interview conducted by Professor Crain Soudien and Professor Thierry Luescher for ‘The Imprint of Education’ project, which is being implemented by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), South Africa, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. This project, which includes a series of critical engagements with experienced scholars and thought leaders on their reimaginings of higher education in Africa, investigates current and future challenges facing the sector, including best practices and innovations. A full transcript of the interview can be downloaded from the HSRC’s website.
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