When it comes to higher education, Africa is in a dilemma.  On the one hand, there are enormous pressures to expand access to higher education, ever more so since most countries introduced Universal Secondary Education twenty years ago.  On the other hand, the resources available to satisfy this demand – either public or private – are extremely limited.  What gets sacrificed?   Too often, it is universities’ research missions, where the payout is both long-term and uncertain.

But that is hardly a costless trade-off.  Countries who sacrifice research often incur much higher costs for training future academics by forcing them to study abroad.  Absent active researchers, African countries are often left out of key international scientific debates.  The ability to increase the knowledge-intensiveness of domestic industry is curtailed.  And most of all, the ability to develop national, indigenous science and ways of looking at the world is deeply impaired.  So, short-term wins for access can come at a pretty heavy cost.

My guest today is Dr. Ernest Aryeetey.  He has not only led one of Africa’s premier universities – the University of Ghana – but is also currently the Secretary-General of the African Research Universities Alliance, or ARUA.  This alliance, which consists mainly but not exclusively of English-language universities from sub-Saharan Africa, is somewhat atypical of an international university alliance.  Unlike, say, the European Universities Association, it does not exist to lobby or partner with a super-national governance structure, since the African Union has not traditionally had a major presence in higher education.  Instead, it has a more general mission to communicate the value of research universities across the continent, while at the same time, trying to work within member universities in order to ensure that the research mission and support for research is reaching a deeper internal audience as well.

This is a wide-ranging interview and it’s hard to pick out the highlights.  Dr. Aryeetey’s comments on the rise of new granting councils (something we also discussed in our episode on India last month), and on the need for more collaboration with industry are both interesting, but for me maybe his most interesting comments were about overcoming the challenge of creating a “culture” of research in African universities.  It’s something I have heard in parts of Asia as well – where the prime mission is teaching, it is challenging to get academic staff to think in terms of knowledge production.  Crucially, Dr. Aryeetey sees the solution to this challenge not just in terms of funding, but also as a function of governance.   If you recall our interview with Dr. Jonathan Jansen earlier this year, you’ll know how correct this take is.

But enough from me: let’s listen to Dr. Artyeetey.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.6 | African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA)

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Dr. Aryeetey, tell me about the challenges of running a research university in Africa. Obviously, funding and resources are major constraints, but what are the other key issues facing these kinds of institutions across Africa?

Ernest Aryeetey (EA): It’s a very challenging thing to do. The funding challenge is simply a reflection of the state underlying it. It’s a much more structural problem. The structural problem comes in the form of a poor research culture in Africa. What it means is that institutions were created by governments, likely to produce undergraduate students who will run the public services. It’s taking a long time for these institutions to be reoriented to focus on research as an important part of development. So, they haven’t done research in many universities for many years. What we are trying to do is to encourage them to develop that research culture – a culture in which you could do research not simply as a requirement for promotion, but as a way of understanding the society and its problems and contributing to the solution of those problems. Once the government’s accepted that, and once universities begin to appreciate that rule in a very important way, we will see the other elements like finance, equipment, infrastructure begin to find solutions. But what’s important is for governments to understand that without solid research, you’re not going to transform economies, you’re not going to have much better run institutions, and so on. So, that’s what I see as the structural issue that needs to be tackled, and that’s what we are about.

AU: One challenge I see for African research universities is how do you make that case, right? That’s because there’s a bit of a conflict between focusing on undergraduates and turning to graduate studies and research. What are the arguments you make when speaking to governments? How do you make that case for a research culture? What’s most effective in making those arguments?

EA: I make any African government that is listening appreciate the fact that they want to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In order to achieve the SDGs, you need to change the way you produce goods and services. You need to change the way you provide health. You need to change the way you provide education. Like any other thing, you can’t change things without innovation. You can’t change things without new knowledge. Even where the knowledge is already established, you have to adapt it to suit the African environment. That requires good research. You’re not going to get that from a university that is overpopulated or a university that is full of thousands of undergraduate students. You have got to find a way of putting less pressure on the universities to produce undergrads. It means you must also be willing to spend more money on supporting them to do research. So having a research university, it’s an expensive thing, but it’s worth doing. It’s worth doing because without doing it, you are not going to get anywhere near the SDGs. You are not going to improve your agricultural situation. You’re not going to improve food security. You’re not going to deal with climate change. You’re not going to be able to deal with health. So, we’ve got to prepare for that and you can’t do that simply relying on undergraduate institutions.

AU: Let me keep on with the subject of governments and how African universities deal with the governments, because it seems to me that governments have a much larger role in oversight and control of universities than they do in some other places. The challenge for universities is too often just to insulate institutions from noxious government policies or direct influence. Now, this might not be the same all over the continent. I expect it’s quite different in Ethiopia than maybe in South Africa. But how big an issue is institutional autonomy? Or the ability for institutions to be able to move quickly to make their own decisions about education and research.

EA: It’s a very important question and a very big issue here. One of the things I have seen is that as African governments continue to support financially their public universities, they slowly begin to ask questions about how the universities are governed and whether the government, the state, should not take an interest in how the governance is done. It’s a legitimate concern, it’s a legitimate question to ask, but I’ve also seen governments go well overboard by trying to control the governance of the institutions in a more direct manner. That is something that I find reprehensible and something that should be discouraged. We try very hard in ARUA to make everybody aware. But what do you have a situation where the vice chancellors have been appointed directly by the state, it’s very, very difficult. So, we are slowly and carefully trying to involve a much bigger discussion through civil society for the states in each country to give more freedom and more latitude to the university to run. Being able to regulate the way universities run is slightly different from running the universities. Many governments in Africa cannot tell the difference between regulating and running the management. They want to control the university council and want to use the council to basically implement government’s decisions, and that is unacceptable. At the University of Africa, where the government wants to be involved in the promotion of academics, they want to be involved in development of the curriculum. [Politicians] hide behind things like “we should be pursuing national development and not simple ivory tower issues” and that is important, but you don’t have to control universities to do that. It’s a very big thing, and we need to fight it.

AU: Let me turn now from the issue of university government relations to university business relations. One challenge it would seem to me is that while there’s lots of good science being done in African universities, in many of the countries those universities are situated in, and in many specific industries, there’s not a lot of absorptive capacity for that science and knowledge in the private sector. I was doing some work for the World Bank a few years ago and I spoke to the head of the lab at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria where the Ebola virus was first sequenced and I asked him, “Doesn’t your work have commercial potential? Can’t this help the university?” And he said, “Well, look, the pharmaceutical industry in Africa only does marketing and packaging. So, who am I supposed to work with?” That has to be a massive challenge for the development of that research culture that you stressed at the beginning. How are universities handling that? How do you solve that problem?

EA: I spent last Monday at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. They were organizing what they call the “Summer School.” I was invited as a resource person to come and speak on developing a relationship between industry and academia. Their concern basically was how do we get industry to support what we’re doing? How do we get industry involved in what we are doing? How do we get industry to be interested in the graduates that we produce? So, it’s a very big thing in Africa. One of the things I said, well I said many things, but one of them was that the industry in Africa is still growing, which confirms the example you just gave with the pharmaceutical industry. It’s still growing, but because it’s still growing, it cannot really show much interest in Research and Development. The R&D that the existing industry undertakes is done by the parent company in the UK or in the US or somewhere in Europe. Of course, we can change that. We’ve got to get governments to have supportive industrial policies and universities can help governments to develop these supportive industrial policies. Industry must grow. Industry cannot grow without innovation. Industry cannot grow unilaterally, like I said earlier about governments and national development. So, industries that seek to grow and that have less dependence can work with universities in a win-win manner. Universities must prepare themselves to work with industry to improve on their profitability and it can be done. I mean, in a pharmaceutical industry, your typical firm simply wants to repackage things from India. That has to change, the market is changing so that there is enough room for collaboration between industry and academia in Africa.

AU: There’s been a lot of external interest in funding African universities, in particular through various iterations of the World Bank’s African Centers of Excellence, both on the west side of the continent and the east side of the continent. My impression, though, is that the resources available to universities from these kinds of projects is much larger than what’s available domestically. So, what happens to these kinds of efforts when an externally funded project ends? What are the prospects for sustainability in these institutions?

EA: Great question. One of the things we preach always is: how do you sustain whatever you receive from outside? How do you make it sustainable? How do you make the whole engagement sustainable? I’m fully aware of the World Bank African Center of Excellence program. The interesting thing there is that it’s a way of getting African governments to support research because what the World Bank provides is a concessional loan basically so the governments are paying for research without intending to, so the government is forced to pay for research without making it a part of the development plan. I think the way forward is reflected in what we’ve introduced through support from the UK government, the Science Granting Councils Initiative. I’m not sure if you are aware of it. It’s built on the model of the South African National Research Foundation. What the NRF does in South Africa is amazing. It is huge. It supports a lot of the research and the graduate work done in South Africa. What we’re seeking to do is to emulate that example in other African countries. We tried; we established an NRF in Kenya. We were trying to work it on it in Nigeria. Ghana has been talking about it for a long time, but — I mean, the reasons why these things are not happening fast enough are largely political. Governments have become interested in the research, but they want to control the process. They want to control the management of the programs. So, they are still working out how do we provide money and not lose control. So that’s an important part of the discussion that must take place. Governments are aware, and through our advocacy work, we push a lot for government involvement. Without it, we can’t make anything sustainable.

AU: Professor Aryeetey, tell us about the African Research Universities Alliance. It began in 2015. What was the catalyst for its formation? And what did people hope could be gained by the creation of a specifically transnational higher education entity?

EA: There are many things that brought us together. The originators were Max Price at University of Cape Town and then also Adam Habib who introduced the whole idea to me, and then we brought on other people and it worked. The main thing that brought us together was: look, we see all the problems that African universities have, regardless of whether they’re in South Africa or in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, we see all that. But these challenges that I’ve talked about, research culture and all these things, they are so huge that one university on its own cannot make any dent on the problem. So, we believe that by working together as a group of universities, we will be more effective in dealing with the research culture issue, for example, we’ll be more effective in mobilizing funds, we’ll be more effective in dealing with academic freedom, we’ll be more effective in making foreign governments think about us a lot more seriously. It’ll be easier to get the attention of the global north. So, these were the things that motivated us to come together. As we began to think about what do we do together? We then settled on the four areas that we’ve identified: enhanced research, enhanced graduate training, input research management, and then advocacy. So, we identified these as areas in which we could work together to make a difference. That is what is really what we’ve been doing. We recognize the fact that even the more endowed South African universities need their partners in the other parts of the region. They need them in order to grow whatever it is that they are doing. They need them to be more seen as global leaders and so on.

AU: Your membership is still small. I think just looking at your website, it’s 16 universities with a third of those, more than a third of those, in South Africa. Yet it seems to me there are some research universities in Africa that are outside your ambit. I’m thinking of places you mentioned Kwame Nkrumah, SUA, and Nelson Mandela Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Tanzania. Why have you kept it small? Are other institutions trying to get in? Is there an expansion plan in the works?

EA: Yeah, there definitely is. We want to cover all parts of Africa, but at the same time, we don’t want to grow too large. We are mindful of the fact that if it’s too large, it’s difficult to manage. It’s more difficult to get the buy in of the vice chancellors and directors into things. So, keep it manageable. We have agreed to grow up to a maximum of 25 institutions. So, our current priority is to bring in more francophone universities and also bring in more North African universities, so we can be seen to be in the North, in the South, in the East, in the West. Currently we have 17 full members, because we brought in University of Cape Coast in Ghana. So, University of Cape Coast is the 17th member. You mentioned Kwame Nkrumah University. We will have a meeting in a couple of weeks, which will formalize the admission of Kwame Nkrumah University. So, they will also come in. Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria has been reinstated. So once that is done, we’ll move from 16 to 19 universities. Then we’ve also opened the door to what we call associate members. So, we began with the University of Mauritius. We’ve also brought in Kinshasa. We will probably very soon bring in a third. We’ve also taken a decision that at any point in time, there shouldn’t be more than five associate members. The associate member category is supposed to be the instrument for bringing up and coming institutions.

AU: I noticed just from following ARUA on Twitter that this isn’t just a club for Presidents. A lot of these institutions, they sort of focus on the president level but it seems to me that there’s a significant amount of effort in your organization placed on thickening inter-institutional linkages at the vice president level, at the level of deans. What do you think are the principal benefits of making deeper inter-institutional linkages like this?

EA: It’s a very, very important part of what we do. When we began, it was seen as a club of presidents and vice chancellors. It became very obvious quite quickly that it was difficult to permeate the institution itself — the member universities. So, I will go to a university that is a member and I’ll give a talk and strangely, the deans of science and the deans of engineering have never heard of ARUA. You cannot change the research culture of an institution if it’s faculty don’t know anything about ARUA or if the students don’t know anything about research, or if the students don’t think about research. The students cannot look beyond their own university. That is what has forced us to certainly move below the vice chancellor. We do have a strong network of deputy vice chancellors for research. In the process of developing very strong platforms for deans of medicine, deans of law, deans of business, engineering, and so on. Between June and the end of August, we had a series of meetings with these deans. We also meeting with Liberians, IT, the librarians. The whole idea is to force everybody to think research collaboration, research management, advocacy, and so on. I think it’s paying off very well. Today, I get requests from deans of medical schools on problems like how can we facilitate a new platform that will bring deans of medicine together to think about how to reform medical education in Africa? That’s the kind of thing that we want to pursue. We want to see a change in the way we treat engineers and it’s for the deans to think about that. These platforms will make it possible, more effective, and something that is in demand.

AU: You’ve mentioned a few times ARUA’s advocacy work, and I was sort of intrigued in that while looking at your strategic plans. Normally when universities talk about advocacy, they’re talking about a level of government that is parallel to them. So, in Europe, the European Universities Association are talking to the European Commission, but a lot of that is talking about money, right? There are millions or billions of euros in horizon research funding. You don’t have a counterpart at the African level of government. So, when you say you’re doing advocacy, who are you addressing yourself to? How do you get the entrees to make the cases to the people who matter?

EA: That’s a very valid point. When we talk advocacy, we are talking to a much more diverse set of institutions. So, the African Union, for example, has not been a major participant in many of the things that are being done. They have their own agenda and they do talk about education, higher education and so on. So that’s, which is fine. What we offer them is solid research being done at much, much lower cost than would have been the case if they went outside looking for help. So, we are putting a lot of pressure on the African Union looking for engagement, channels and so on. Through our connection with the European Union, I think we are seeing some success. It’s likely because they deal quite closely with the European Union and the European Union deals with European networks of universities. So that’s one way in which we’ve channeled that. But, a part of our advocacy is focused on governments, national governments like I mentioned earlier. So, each of our member universities is expected to lead the charge to make governments aware of the fact that they need to support research universities differently from the way they support higher education in general. One of the messages that I always sell is that differentiation among universities, it’s not a bad thing. Differentiation is good and governments need to appreciate and support that. It is through differentiation that you foster competition among universities and that competition is essential. It’s essential for innovation. You’re not going to get people to discover things without competition. You’re going to create an environment in which academics compete with each other. Many African cultures fear competition. We say it’s a good thing if it’s properly monitored. We want to do advocacy with the private sector and we want to show the African private sector that good research is available in the region and can be useful to support their work.

AU: Finally, what makes you most optimistic about African research universities? If we could see 10 years into the future, how much do you think your members will have changed for the better?

EA: Before I came to ARUA, I was a vice chancellor, I’ve seen first-hand how the university is run. I’ve had a chance to compare my university to other universities. So, when I talk about African higher education, I have a very good sense of what the challenges are. One of the things that I believe I’ve tried to help ARUA to do is to foster a rethink of the governance arrangements at universities. In what way do you democratize it? In what way do you use it to pursue excellence? In what way do you encourage young people, especially women, to think about what they can contribute, as opposed to what they get out of being part of the university? It cuts both ways. So, change has always been what I have preached. For me, ARUA is simply an instrument for sponsoring and initiating change. I will be very happy if in 10 years, we have universities in Africa where putting aside money for research is taken for granted, is a part of the culture. We have universities in Africa that see graduate training in a much more rigorous manner as a part of the university’s culture. That would be good for me. Seeing vice chancellors in future, who think about development, who think about good governance, who think about innovation, that for me will be the hallmark of success. Once that changes, it will be easier to get governments to want to support. Once that changes, it will be a lot easier to get the private sector on board. Once that changes, we will have students that are much more committed to the future.

AU: That is all the time we have for today. Dr. Aryeetey, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

EA: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

AU: It remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, the listener, for joining us today. If you have any questions or suggestions for future podcasts, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when joining us from Israel will be Maria Yudkiewicz, co-author of the excellent new book, Higher Education in Russia, out recently from John Hopkins Press, and she’ll be talking to us about the remarkable historical journey of Russian universities from Lenin to now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.