AAP Universities' Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Lessons Learned and Shared

Introduction

Nations across the globe have had to rapidly come to terms with coping and finding solutions to the challenges that beset them with the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. African universities, and indeed even those in the Global North, have had many challenges to overcome primarily with continuing education, responding to government and community needs, innovating science to respond to the pandemic, maintaining research programs, and providing accurate and continuous information to students and staff. Most universities responded with various levels of successes and they continue to confront the ongoing challenges from continued teaching and learning to financial sustainability.

In this piece, university leaders from several Alliance for African Partnership member institutions reflect on their personal and institutional responses to the pandemic. They highlight successes, challenges, and lessons learned from the initial stages of the pandemic. Their reflections come from adapted presentations or articles shared in different international venues during the 2020 academic year.

—Amy Jamison, Coeditor, AAP Perspectives, Michigan State University

Samuel L. Stanley, Jr., President, Michigan State University

This text is a revised version of remarks from the Alliance for the African Partnership Dialogue Series webinar "Educational Access at Higher Education Institutions in the Age of COVID-19," held on May 27, 2020.

Michigan State University (MSU) is one of the leading public research universities in the United States. It is a member the Association of American Universities, one of the sixty-five best research universities in the United States. MSU has an estimated 50,000 students, and we are proud of the fact that we are a global university. Africa has long been the centerpiece of MSU's international engagement. MSU's legacy of international partnerships began in West Africa in 1960 when MSU President John Hannah, who was deeply committed to international cooperation, traveled to Nigeria and worked with Nigerian leader Nnamdi Azikiwe to jointly establish the first land-grant university on the continent—the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. This set the stage for what has been six decades of MSU engagement and partnership across Africa.

As an infectious disease specialist who devoted a large part of his career to dealing with the challenge of emerging diseases, I watched as reports emerged from China of a new coronavirus outbreak. I knew this would potentially be the Third World outbreak of coronavirus that we were seeing—the first being the SARS coronavirus; the second being a virus called MERS, which has had a number of outbreaks around the world. I followed this news with interest, and my thinking was it would behave very much like the previous two coronaviruses did. Both of those were very severe diseases, but they could be controlled by standard public health measures. We were able to isolate, identify cases, isolate people who were infected, stop the chain of transmission, and thereby stop the disease. I really thought the same thing would happen in Wuhan, China. But as I watched what was happening, as the number of cases grew, it became clear that this was a much more contagious disease than those previous coronaviruses, and it was much more likely that this could lead to a worldwide pandemic. As the virus spread out of China, beginning to affect Europe, and of course eventually the United States, I realized we were dealing with something that we have not seen in decades. The most severe previous epidemic we saw as a world was the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, which, of course, created an epidemic in the 1980s that we are still dealing with on a global scale. COVID-19 is the most severe disease we have seen since that time, and its impact on the world has been extraordinary. I do not think I could have predicted that the United States would lead the world in the number of cases and by far lead the world in the number of deaths.

In February, I appointed a task force to begin planning for contingencies that we might see at MSU. This team talked about the possibility of moving to online learning. We looked toward lessons from other places in the United States and around the world. Seattle, Washington, was one of the earliest places of outbreak in the United States, and the University of Washington made the move to online learning early. We modeled our plan for how we would respond on their response. When the first cases appeared in the State of Michigan, we made the decision to shift to complete online learning. That was earlier than other campuses, but most universities and colleges in Michigan followed us very quickly. That was on March 11, and within two days, we were teaching everyone remotely. It was an amazing accomplishment, and I must congratulate the faculty and staff at MSU for the work they did in that transition. Most students left campus and returned to their families, but we continued to host about 2,000 students on campus, including our international students who were not able to return home. About 88 percent of the people who work on campus returned to their homes as well. We encouraged staff not to go to work if they could work remotely. We completed our semester with staff and students engaging remotely, we went through our final exams, and we held a virtual commencement for our students.

It was a sea of change and yet everyone responded well. I would not say that it has gone perfectly. There have been significant challenges—one being disparities in students' abilities to access courses because of their access to wi-fi in their homes or access to laptops. In the United States COVID-19 has had disparate effects on different populations. It has hit our African American and health-care-underserved communities with much more serious affect. One important statistic to illustrate this is that African Americans represent about 14 percent of the population of Michigan but 40 percent of the deaths from coronavirus in the state. It points out problems with healthcare in the United States and with poverty in the United States, but we also see it reflected in education. Our students who come from these communities have not only had the disruption that the coronavirus caused to their education; they have also seen their families disrupted and devastated by this outbreak. Our sensitivity to that is important.

We have tried to address some of these issues by working to provide technology to our students. One example is that when we transitioned to remote learning and sent people home, we had a lot of students who lost employment, but we also identified a need to make our courses more accessible for those with disabilities. We employed students who had lost other employment in captioning courses for the hearing-impaired as well as narrating courses and narrating charts for the visually impaired. This was a practical way to get students employed and to support our students with disabilities in at least those two areas.

We have encouraged more online learning over the summer and have created more online courses for students in summer than we ever have before. One major focus has been on training our faculty to be prepared for the switch to more online learning in the future. We have educated more than 350 of our faculty on how to teach better and more effectively online. Improving the quality of the online learning we provide has been a priority. We had a group of faculty members who never considered teaching remotely or certainly teaching online. With this pandemic, they were not just dipping their toe in the water but having to jump straight into the pool. Supporting them in quality teaching and learning during this time will likely make them more amenable to doing it in the future.

At MSU, we also had to adapt in ways that support our research mission. Some research had to stop in the beginning phases of the pandemic when we switched to the remote learning and staff began working from home. We did have an exception that was made for any research related to COVID-19. We have now developed over fifty new research projects on our campus devoted to COVID-19 in response to the demand from the country for better therapies, for better diagnostic tools, and for better personal protection equipment for people who are working on the frontlines.

MSU's COVID-19 research and the successes we have had so far are a clear demonstration of the value of the university to the State of Michigan, to our country, and even to the globe. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, we have engaged in worldwide collaborations. For example, we worked with universities in Uganda, Senegal, and Botswana on mechanical ventilator development. Researchers at MSU had been engaged in this work, and we learned through the Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) that the other universities were also working on the challenge of developing low-cost, easily repairable ventilators. We know that ventilators are essential for supporting people through the acute phase of the coronavirus infection, and the collaborative research team developed ways to produce a ventilator with readily available, relatively inexpensive parts. It is a great example of how the AAP has brought researchers together to begin discussions on how their joint work can make a difference in countries around the globe.

The task force also spent significant time planning for when MSU could start bringing students and staff back to campus. A number of things had to be put in place to do that. One of those was the wearing of masks. We developed the policy that everyone would need to wear a mask when they return, both indoors and outdoors. When staff were in their own office, or students were in their own dormitory rooms, they were able to take their mask off, but the rest of the time we expected people to be wearing masks. The most vulnerable population on our campus are the one third of our faculty and staff who are over the age of fifty, which puts them in a higher risk group if they contract the coronavirus infection. We had to ensure they were protected. We have made modifications to classrooms to provide protections. We held some classes outside when weather permitted. Where climates are good, holding activities outside is something universities can do as an effective way to mitigate risk. We have tried to keep people six feet apart to allow for social distancing—the better term is actually "physical distancing"—and we held hybrid in-person and virtual classes in addition to those classes that are purely delivered online. For very large classes, where we have 500 people in a class, it has not been practical for them to meet in-person. Even with masks, the risk is too high to stay in the space for hours with so many students. We have been working to cut those classes down in size, having sections of them that can be face-to-face, but offering the lectures themselves only online, asynchronously. We included the option to adjust our academic calendar to have a stop point where we moved to purely online for the last three weeks of the semester.

We think it has been extremely important to make these adaptations so that the university can continue to serve our students, our staff, and our community. MSU continued to operate through the Civil War and through the 1918 flu outbreak. We want to continue that tradition of serving our students. We know for some of our economically disadvantaged students this has been a huge challenge, and they may be going home to situations that are less conducive to their learning than they would be on campus; therefore, we wanted to preserve the option for them to remain on campus where they have access to wi-fi and where they also have the social interactions that are so important for students.

The financial consequences of the pandemic in the United States have been extraordinary. To give an example from MSU, we had a $60 million loss for the 2019–2020 fiscal year. For the current fiscal year, which started in July 2020, we estimated we may have between a $150 to $300 million reduction in our revenue. Some of this shortfall is related to a significant decline in the number of international students coming to MSU, as some have not been able to obtain visas to come to the United States. Others may have concerns about the epidemic in the country. The reduction in tuition from international students is significant for us. We have been working hard to respond to this challenge and to the financial need of our students, whose families may have been affected by loss, or whose parents may have become unemployed due to the pandemic. MSU has been working through both government and institutional funds. We have frozen our tuition and room and board rates for the coming year so there will be no increase in cost for our students. We are thinking critically and planning a way forward that will allow us to continue our core missions of education, research, and the extension/outreach that is so important to MSU as a land-grant institution.

All of the universities in the AAP share a number of challenges, but we also share a number of opportunities. Though our context may differ from the United States to Kenya, South Africa, or Tanzania, COVID-19 has highlighted that we are globally interconnected. The pandemic is a worldwide problem. Thus, many of the solutions we have in the United States may work for African universities, and many of the solutions African universities innovate may work for U.S. universities, with MSU being no exception. Sharing information and working together is more important than ever. The shared challenges of remote and online education persist globally. Therefore, all our universities must ensure we have proper infrastructure in place to facilitate quality learning for our students. We must also support our academic staff to ensure they can adapt to new ways of teaching, as well as address issues of access inequities to ensure all students have the tools required to learn in this new context of online learning.

Tawana Kupe, Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of Pretoria

This text is a revised version of an article, "COVID-19 Highlights the Need for Universities to Evolve," published in the World University News, Africa Edition, on September 3, 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for universities to reimagine their role in providing high quality, relevant education and creating knowledge for the transformation of the lives of individuals and greater societal impact to create transformative futures.

In times of crisis, we are compelled to change our strategies and move away from conventional approaches. Confronted as we are with the global COVID-19 pandemic along with climate change, education, unemployment, poverty, food security, and economic crises, there is no place for "business as usual"—because nothing will be "as usual" again. Our universities need to be engaged in creative and innovative research and teaching and learning strategies to address the many different spheres required to solve the complex, intersectional African and global crises that the pandemic has further exposed. The strategies we adopt for a better world require bold thinking and agile shifts. We need the research voices at Africa's universities coming strongly to the fore with context-appropriate strategies and solutions. We need to partner with universities globally to accelerate discoveries, new knowledge, and breakthroughs that make a positive difference.

It is positive to see that this has already been happening and our voices are being heard. One of the benefits for researchers in this era is the rapid switch to online platforms, which is stimulating collaborations with African and international partners at an unprecedented rate. During the pandemic, staff and students at the University of Pretoria (UP) have been involved in transdisciplinary and transinstitutional research at multiple levels: from research on how the virus infects people, to participating in international COVID-19 clinical trials. We are currently researching genome profiles to be able to profile risk in the future and identify who in the population is at higher risk of contracting deadly viruses and other diseases. At the same time, we are researching how people and society behave during a pandemic because if we do not understand their behavior, we cannot optimally manage the spread of an outbreak. We have achieved this in certain sectors where our Faculty of Health Sciences quickly incorporated COVID-19 into the primary health care program.

Rapid response and multisectoral interventions are imperative because we do not want to be caught off-guard again. Pandemics, as we know, require a multiplicity of knowledge and skills. Multi-, transdisciplinary, and transinstitutional research has always been at the core of our work, but it is an imperative in this era, because it will shape the future of research, in particular on the African continent.

In so many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic is a game-changer, not only for how we think, research, create, and innovate, but also how we deliver education. COVID-19 has exposed just how tech-savvy we need to be to adapt to an online world. At the same time, the switch to hybrid teaching and learning models has exposed the glaring inequalities in education—from basic education through to higher education. A lack of access to online learning and digital skills puts many young people at risk of falling behind their peers. It also deepens the divide between students on the continent who have access, and those who do not.

It is fortunate that UP was not caught off-guard in the rush to move to remote emergency online teaching and learning when the South African government announced the COVID-19 lockdown at the end of March 2020. We were able to continue to provide high-quality education because we acted five years ago, when our University recognized the global trend to hybrid teaching and learning. We had also faced other crises in the country that required this transition, such as during the #FeesMustFall student protests, when many university campuses in South Africa had to close. It was at this time, in 2015, when we transitioned UP to a hybrid teaching and learning model. It is fortunate that 96 percent of our undergraduate modules were already online when COVID-19 struck. We also built on our already existing hybrid model last year by investing R100m in our IT infrastructure. With this invested, we were able to create the UP Connect portal when we switched to remote teaching and learning online at the beginning of South Africa's lockdown. This portal has enabled our students to access learning resources at no data costs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Transitioning to a completely online mode during the pandemic naturally required adaptation and monitoring. Surveys we conducted of the UP populations' experiences with this transition revealed that the majority of our lecturers and students managed to adapt well. To facilitate students' learning process, lecturers are present and available during regular, scheduled lecture periods to discuss difficult concepts and answer questions. This includes a twenty-minute Blackboard Collaborate session, twenty minutes of online discussions through our Learning Management System (LMS) known as clickUP, and twenty minutes dedicated to email and telephonic engagement with students. Data from the survey showed that this ongoing contact with lecturers and fellow students helps students feel safe, while the discipline of attending online classes during regularly scheduled class times keeps the students on track.

At UP, we also loaned laptops to all our students who did not have suitable devices (1,937 in total). It is fortunate that only a small number of our students experience connectivity and electricity supply challenges at home; these students have been allocated a telephone tutor. We will be prioritizing future spending toward sustaining and expanding our hybrid teaching and learning platform, and with donor funding we received recently, we will be employing tutors and student advisors to take some of the online teaching load off the academics. The model we are using is certainly not a one-size-fits-all, and we are adapting it as required. With the partial return to campus, we needed to create special timetables for students requiring lab sessions and on-site practicals. Like the rest of the world, we eagerly await a time when we can all safely return to campus. Everything should not remain online indefinitely because education is a social activity that connects people and humanity. The pandemic has reinforced the simple, human value of being on campus and the face-to-face interaction it provides.

The additional costs to universities as a result of the pandemic have also hit home. These have been enormous, and governments should feel duty bound to provide financial assistance. After all, it is universities that produce professionals, specialists, and leaders in every sector of a society. The world urgently needs leaders who are well-educated, well-skilled, and well-rounded citizens; leaders with wisdom and foresight who see the way forward to creating a better society in a changed era. To achieve, this we need strong institutions that nurture leaders, anchor truly democratic futures, and promote inclusive economic development, environmental sustainability, and social progress. Universities have a critical role to play in achieving these goals. Through all our collaborative efforts we will be able to defeat viruses like COVID-19. There will be more, and we must develop new knowledge to save lives, to live more sustainably, and, during our tenure, to substantively contribute to creating a better life for all.

Ibrahima Thioub, Recteur, Université Cheikh Anta Diop

This text is a revised version of remarks from the Alliance for the African Partnership Dialogue Series webinar, "COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Lessons Learned from African Universities," held on April 29, 2020.

The first case of the COVID-19 virus was recorded in Senegal on March 2, 2020. On March 16, the Senegalese government made the decision to close the universities and schools and declare a state of emergency across the country. Travel was also shut down between districts, or what is called départements in Senegal (there are forty-five in Senegal).

After the Université Cheikh Anta Diop's (UCAD) closing, the students left immediately. We had planned for students to return to campus on April 6. But when that day arrived, the government and university management realized the return date would need to be extended to May 4. We now know that May 4 was not realistic, and the students would need to remain home.

At the governmental level, the decision was made that universities needed to continue teaching students and carry on with their research. The university was asked to find solutions to deliver pedagogical resources in an accurate way and to use technology to ensure access for all students. At UCAD, we had online meetings with the top management, and we realized our faculties and institutes had different experiences in digital learning and online courses. From taking these differences into account at the central level, we decided to create platforms for the institutes, faculties, and schools that they could adapt. Yet the most critical question for everyone was the issue of student connectivity and access to the internet, because they are located all over Senegal. We are a big university, and the student population is around 75,000 across the three levels of study. There are also more than 3,000 members faculty members, and the staff members number 1,500. At each level of education, the number of students is different with those in bachelor's degree programs being the majority.

Because the students had to spread out across the country so quickly, they could not use UCAD's wi-fi any longer, which meant student connectivity was a critical issue. During students' University registration, we collect their cellphone numbers, so we were able to send them SMS texts to remain in contact with all students. We asked all faculties and institutions to connect with their students and continue to teach using the platform to deliver syllabi and pedagogical resources and gain feedback from the students. We also met with the student union, who are well-organized, and asked them to assist us with the issue of ensuring issues of student inequity to access was addressed. We also tried to enhance the capacity of our digital connection from a specialized line of 8–15 giga.

The other major issue we had to address was that of ensuring our staff was safe. At the UCAD, we have a medical and social welfare institute, which is responsible for all health concerns at the University. They have provided communication about the prevention of COVID-19, what should be done in the case of symptoms appearing, and how infected people must behave. They have also produced posters that have been put up across the University for those who are continuing to work in the administrative and technical departments, as well as the University management. We asked our staff who are use public transportation to stay home, and we ensured that all staff coming to campus respected social distancing. We also delivered masks and sanitizer to all members of staff to ensure they could protect themselves. A priority for us is safety and keeping our staff healthy.

For our society, we mobilized our social anthropologists who intervened in the press, the newspapers, social networks, and on the internet to help the government communicate efficiently. Our School of Communication has expertise in this area. In our Faculty of Science and Technology, we were able to produce hand sanitizer for communities, and we delivered 6,000 liters to communities daily via our polytechnical school. The students who have mobilized in their home communities to make it easier for students to get access to their courses and to also help their communities follow the public health recommendations made by the government and medical personnel.

UCAD's polytechnical school not only produced hand sanitizer, but also some technological devices. This includes a robot that delivers food to people who are infected with the virus. The robot is a prototype, and it speaks Wolof, Pulaar, and French. The school has also created another device that delivers sanitizer remotely. The Faculty of Medicine, which is one of the oldest faculties of medicine in any Francophone country, is on the frontline of taking care of infected members of the population with our Faculty's staff and academic staff working closely with the students. Students who are at advanced levels in their medical training have been mobilized in hospitals and in communities to help support medical staff.

A variety of University resources have also been mobilized. For example, historians have been working to explain to people what the experience of an epidemic was like during the Spanish flu in 1918, the year our faculty of medicine was created. Historians are also supporting community involvement in communication. Mathematicians have mobilized to help with modeling the epidemic and its evolution. In addition, we have a radio station on campus, which has been mobilized to invite experts to talk to students. The radio covers 150 kilometers and is also available on the internet, so it has been able to reach students who reside at far distances from UCAD. Our library has been closed to the public, but students can continue to use our online library. We have also provided our students with information about how access resources at many other libraries around the globe that now have free online access.

For UCAD, the key learning from the pandemic has been the importance of developing online courses and technologies, as well as having our staff trained to engage in these activities. We have some faculty members who are highly qualified in this type of work, whereas other schools and institutes are just at the beginning phases. Thus, as we go forward, we will invest a great deal in these areas—a decision that has been made by UCAD's top management.

I will finish by reflecting on this experience, using philosophy and thinking about what we have learned from this pandemic. Angelus Novus is a Paul Klee painting from 1920. It depicts that we are on wings flying on a wind coming from Paradise. We cannot stop this wind; however, progress in one direction means the ruin of everything. We need to change the direction of this progress, to go in another direction. To explain this, I will move from Angelus to the Sankofa system. This demonstrates that Africa has something to teach to other people—to slow down. We are going too fast for human speed. I think that we can use philosophy to understand if it is normal to go so fast and to create so much wealth and inequality among people. There is this discrepancy. People are working hard, and development may be growth, but, at the same time, it also creates inequality. We must think about what kind of progress we need to share in the humanities. That is one lesson learned from this pandemic.

David Norris, Vice Chancellor, University of Botswana

This text is a revised version of remarks from the Alliance for the African Partnership Dialogue Series webinar, "COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Lessons Learned from African Universities," held on April 29, 2020.

We closed the University of Botswana (UB) on April 1, the day after Botswana's president, His Excellency Dr. Mokgweetsi Masisi, declared a state of emergency in the country. The state of emergency went into full effect in the country on April 2. After announcing the closure of UB, students immediately left for their homes; however, international students could not go, so they continued to remain on campus.

One challenge with UB's closure is that it is primarily a contact-teaching university, which means we do most of our teaching and learning in a classroom setting with direct contact with our students. We had capabilities for going online, but there is quite an array of challenges, including connectivity in rural areas and issues of inequality among students. For example, some students have access to laptops and resources to purchase data—tools that would enable them to download all the online teaching and learning material; other students do not have these resources. These are the issues that the University continues to think about as we move into remote teaching and learning: How do we support those students who may not have the necessary resources to participate in online learning, or who may have the resources but reside in areas where there may not be internet connectivity? We have a task team that is proactively planning what our University can do to develop different approaches to teaching. There will obviously be different sets of students with different needs, and therefore, it is crucial for us to devise different approaches to continue teaching and learning during this time. We will not be able to stop contact teaching and learning indefinitely, but we need to find other ways to ensure academic activities can resume. When teaching resumes, the University management needs to consider what form of teaching and learning will take place at UB and what needs to be in place to ensure this type of learning can occur?

Some of our ideas are the following. First, we are considering providing laptops to all our students. We are currently in discussions with sponsors to find out if our students, those who do not have laptops, can have them provided. This cost would then be embedded in their tuition or scholarship. We are also talking to mobile providers to negotiate discounted prices, and in some cases even asking for zero rates for students when they access educational sites. Arriving at agreements in these two areas are key to enabling UB to move to an online learning context, because students need to have basic things, such as laptops, inexpensive access to the internet, and so on. In addition, some of the teaching staff only have access to desktop computers that are in their offices. Thus, we are considering providing all lecturers with small loans to procure laptops to allow them to engage in remote teaching and learning.

The University is also assisting itself and the country's government to mitigate against the COVID-19 pandemic. The first way we are doing this is by providing clinical care via our Faculty of Medicine, which has residents with essential skills, specialized nurses, pharmacists, critical care specialists, and emergency physicians. They are actively taking care of patients at UB's teaching hospital, as well as spread across the country working at many of Botswana's public hospitals. UB is also providing psychosocial care. This is a time where there is a lot of stress for those who are in quarantine, for those who have contracted the virus, and for the medical staff who provide care. Psychosocial care, therefore, becomes very important. We have specialists, psychologists, and social workers who are working closely with teams from local governments and the Ministry of Health. We are also working together closely with other stakeholders to provide all these services.

The UB is also actively working on innovations to address the challenges of the pandemic. Our Pharmacy Department in the Faculty of Health Sciences is producing sanitizer, some of which we are donating to hospitals. We have also produced face shields in our labs and donated 100 to UB's teaching hospital. We will continue to mass-produce these shields as we go forward. We are also working on producing protective equipment such as boots, masks, and so forth. Finally, we are creating a prototype ventilator in collaboration with our sister institution, Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST), Botswana Institute for Technology Research and Innovation (BITRI), which is another innovation center in Gaborone, as well as industry partners.

In terms of research, scientists from the Departments of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, and Health Sciences are exploring the extraction of medicines from indigenous plants, such as aromatic plants, that have been used traditionally as inhalants to open chest airways. These plants have historically been wrapped around one's chest to aid breathing. In addition, testing for COVID-19 is also an important research focus. UB's Department of Biology is collaborating with the national health lab to increase our country's capacity for testing. The goal is to conduct at least 3,000 tests per day. Advisory services are also extremely important. Many UB professionals are working on different government task teams in the area of economics, among others. Finally, the work that we have done with the Ministry of Health to create a dashboard for monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic is worth mentioning. We have developed three computer software tools manage and monitor COVID-19 in Botswana.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a lot of challenges for us, but it has also opened our eyes. There are great opportunities and lessons emerging from this experience. For example, the era where universities work alone is no more. Universities must be at the center of development. We must be at the forefront of finding solutions to societal challenges, working closely with ministries, with governments, and with industry. Such collaborations must be the norm for us. Another lesson is that of self-reliance. We cannot rely solely on other people or other nations to find solutions for us or come to our aid. We must find solutions for ourselves. We must be self-reliant.

Rose Mwonya, Vice Chancellor, Egerton University

This text is a revised version of remarks from the Alliance for the African Partnership Dialogue Series webinar, "COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Lessons Learned from African Universities," held on April 29, 2020.

Following the directives by His Excellency the President of Kenya that the country needed to go into lockdown, all learning institutions in Kenya were closed on March 20, 2020. Egerton was among these institutions. All students went home except for the international students who could not travel because no flights were allowed into Kenya or out to other countries. The pandemic made us realize that we had not made use of our College of Distance Learning here at the university. We had not previously utilized the full capacity of this college. However, the graduate school continued teaching master's and PhD students online with a focus on particular populations. These include the limnology students, who are funded by the Austrian government, the Center for Excellence in Sustainable Agriculture and Agribusiness Management (CESAAM) students, sponsored by the World Bank, and the targeted students, funded by the Mastercard Foundation. These students had support from these sponsors, and it was easier to move on and take care of them in the way we wanted.

The University decided to contact the Kenya Education Network (KENET) to train our faculty online, which we have now done. We then moved to our College of Distance Learning, which is now assisting the teaching staff with developing their courses and uploading them on the system ready for teaching. The leadership of the faculties are also meeting to test how a thesis defense can be done online.

During this period, we had two departments that rose to the challenge of developing cleanliness materials for the university. The Department of Chemistry quickly developed sanitizers so that each department had sanitizers to clean their hands. Also, the section of tailoring, which is under the Department of Clothing and Textiles, produced masks. In our own small way, we took care of ourselves at Egerton University, and our county is ready to collaborate with us to make more bottles of sanitizer and masks.

We have had a few challenges. We normally teach face-to-face, and so there is a concern about offering examinations online. This is a big debate that the vice chancellors in Kenya are considering. The question of how we mitigate security is giving us a little headache. In addition, not all areas in Kenya have internet connectivity. We are an agricultural institution and reaching out to students from rural areas is a big challenge. It hampers our online training for the students. Some of the students from poor backgrounds are not able to afford internet connections, and this is also a concern.

Operations in the university have been curtailed by a lack of funds. We have been relying on fees from students, and we are therefore hard-hit with their absence. It is also difficult for researchers to work at full capacity. We conduct a lot of work in the field in rural areas. Due to lockdown, researchers cannot pass certain areas in the country. There are sectional restrictions that hinder researchers to travel to areas such as Nairobi and Mombasa. We have many experiments in these areas, so this is a big challenge for us.

Communication among staff is a challenge. We are used to face-to-face communication, but right now we have to talk virtually through phones, emails, and video conferencing, especially Zoom, which KENET has taught us how to do. Lab work and experimental work is also limited because we have not perfected this type of work online. We need to know how it can be done remotely. Before the pandemic, we only had eleven courses online in the College of Distance Learning, but now we are developing more classes to be uploaded on the system for virtual learning.

In conclusion, I want to say that the lockdown is an eye-opener for innovators and those working in the space of technologies about the need to design tools to make online instruction easier, especially in agricultural-based institutions like ours and institutions that are very much practice oriented. The other thing we need to determine is how to get back to normalcy with renewed strength and responsibilities among all actors. One of the problems I foresee, even if we have an extended lockdown and then decide to return quickly to contact teaching, is simply managing this process because our students come from all over the country and all over the world. I am not sure how we will come together and mingle. It is something I am trying to figure out, but I foresee a problem in the near future, if students are brought back on campus too early.