Notes from the Field
- Notes from the Field
The establishment of the Africa Virtual University (AVU) must have come with very little or inadequate prior assessment of its feasibility, especially in terms of what university education means to most young Africans. Inadequate availability of ICT (information communication technology) facilities, including connectivity and even electricity, is not the only problem that may stand in the way of success of this approach to providing university education. Being educated in a university is a transformational experience. Given that most African university students come from the peasantry in rural areas, university education to them is not only [End Page 176] a matter of the acquisition of knowledge in a given field, but also of the entire transformational experience of being in a university. This is one of the reasons why private universities in a country such as Uganda have an influx of students, while the AVU, which is assumed to be more easily accessible, does not. Apart from need assessments that should be conducted on the ground before establishing such alternative universities, there also need to be studies of the questions of how parents and high school students perceive the AVU, and whether they accept it as an alternative or equivalent to being in a conventional university.
Second, it is often not realized that the use of ICT is not only a matter of having the requisite knowledge, skills, software, hardware, connectivity, and accessibility, but is also a matter of cultural reorientation. ICT is best utilized when people are comfortable with it; in other words, it may not be easy for many high school graduates who have not, for one reason or another, made it to a conventional university to seek or utilize the alternative virtual education. In this respect, introducing the AVU should have been accompanied by intensive promotion to high school students and parents as an alternative way of accessing a university education.
Reading Esther Hicks's essay makes one reflect on the slowness by which the use of online training is taking root in Africa and this cultural mindset. The question that would probably be best asked is not only whether the AVU can transform higher education in sub-Saharan Africa, but also whether the mindset of all sub-Saharan Africans yearning for academic degrees has been transformed to wholly embrace the AVU as an equivalent to conventional universities for providing higher education. The future success of the African Virtual University must be addressed through a combination of national education and ICT policies as well as national strategies for fostering the cultural mindset toward the utilization of ICT not only to access education, but also many other social services.
John-Mary Kauzya is chief of the Governance and Public Administration branch of the division for Public Administration and Development Management in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where he has worked for the previous six years. Prior to his current position, he worked as an interregional adviser in governance institutions and systems in the same UN branch. Prior to joining the international civil service at the United Nations, he taught at Makerere University in Uganda and worked as deputy director of the Uganda Management Institute and as an international consultant in Africa in various fields of governance, public administration, and management. Kauzya obtained his bachelor’s degree from Makerere University in Uganda and undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Grenoble III, the Liverpool Institute of Public Administration and Management, the International Institute of Public Administration in France, and the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria. He holds a Ph.D. in law from the University of Paris Pantheon Sorbonne, He can be reached at <kauzya@un.org>.
