Higher Education in Africa. Crises, Reforms and Transformation

Conclusion

Conclusion It is worth recalling that by the time African countries started to acquire their political independence, human capital theory was popular and guided education policies under the eye of experts from industrial countries. Given the euphoria about the assumed economic value of education, questions concerning which type of education and what development did not guide policy decisions. Several facts challenged the human capital assumption of a positive and linear relationship between education and development. Without even dealing with the substantive question of whether growth can lead to development, these facts challenged the notion that education, measured often in terms of number of years of formal education, leads to economic growth or development. The phenomenon known as the ‘brain drain’ also shows that countries that had earlier achieved relatively higher proportions of enrolment and output of the higher education institutions may not be better developed. Rather, their stock of human resources is depleted by the massive departure among the most highly educated segment of the population as a result of a junction of multiple factors, with a final trigger provided by political strife or severe downward economic trends. Thus it appears that education, especially higher education, alone is not a sufficient condition for development. While African leaders and their populations have continued to put their faith in education, conflicting messages have been communicated by means of differential allocation of education finance to the different levels of the system. Higher education, hailed by international organisations and industrial countries in the immediate post-colonial period of the 1960s and 1970s, became anathema to them, especially the World Bank. Since the end of the 1990s, higher education has become again an object of interest. With the merger of the assistance to African education into a single institutional framework, the ‘Donors to African Education - DAE’ renamed ‘Association for the Development of Education - ADEA’, even organisations and governments that had in the past been critical of neo-liberal policies enshrined in the IMF and World Bank appeared to have been co-opted, or at best agreed Higher Education in Africa: Crises, Reforms, and Transformation 156 upon an inevitable convergence of views and policies, until the World Bank rediscovered the relevance of higher education for African development. In its joint commissioned work Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril or Promise? (The Task Force on Higher Education and Society, 2000), it is eloquently articulated that higher education is necessary for the fruitful pursuit of development agendas in the twenty-first century to participate in the ‘knowledge economy’ (Task Force 2000:17). There is still a lack of vigorous and unequivocal support for higher education. The “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers ” (PRSPs) emphasise more the process of further integration of African economies and population into the global market. Even if higher education matters and projects may be scattered in other units, the fact that The World Bank’s staff that concentrates on higher education in Africa has been kept to a bare minimum of two (having been kept at one more than a decade) is a testimony to this neglect. Why has there been, in the first place, any reasonable expectation that the World Bank and other international organisations would permit or enthusiastically support the development of African higher education? The nature of the agents that define the philosophical framework and the practical policies of the World Bank constitute an indicator of the infringement on the actual sovereignty and self-determination of societies. Indeed higher education, as a subsector of the social institution that provides a key component of the influential knowledge produced and is central in social reproduction, cannot reasonably be expected to be managed, and appropriately so, by external agencies in general . More specifically, a single international institution like the World Bank, no matter how powerful and having much support from world powers, and precisely because of its own agenda and mission, cannot be expected to provide support to higher education in African countries from a nationalistic perspective . As argued in this book, there is a need to reclaim history and locate African higher education in its relevant socio-historical context, and critically to examine the cumulative process that produced the current systems in order to make sense of the crises and the counter-productive solutions that were prescribed through the allocation of financial resources. The various forms of change in the different waves of reforms and innovation require critical analysis. Fostering systems that can help address the impact of the challenges and prevent new ones from...