My reputation in Canadian higher education, for better or for worse, is that of being “the guy who knows what’s going on in other places”.  This credits me with a lot more knowledge than I actually have. But it does occasionally prompt people to ask me some interesting questions.  Recently, someone (hi, Krista!) asked me: so what would you say to someone who has a few million dollars to spend, and wanted to spend it on improving higher education for sub-Saharan Africans?

That’s a really good question.  So here’s my answer. 

What most people are inclined to do, as a first pass, is to create scholarships which allow promising African students to study abroad.  The Mastercard Foundation, for instance, did this as its first initiative.  But while this provides life-changing opportunities for the individuals selected, it does virtually nothing for the continent because by and large students who leave don’t come back.  Mastercard, to its credit, figured this out after a couple of years and changed tack.

So the next option is to try to find ways to fund African universities themselves.  One thing Mastercard now does is fund scholarships at selected high-quality African universities such as Ashesi University in Ghana or the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town.  This is a better idea than sending students abroad (it’s cheaper for one thing, so a given amount of money can help more people) and the institutions can use the income to improve their facilities and offerings.  That’s not bad.  But we can still do better.

Let’s start at the top.  African nations have collectively adopted a lot of high-sounding policies about Science, Technology and Innovation, but frankly the policy capacity of African governments to make this happen is pretty low.  If government capacity is the issue, it’s time to focus training on public servants, few of whom have a strong sense of how higher education and the private sector can and cannot support one another to support innovation.  Take 500 or so public servants from across African public sectors, run constant short-course training over three years through established African public policy institutes such as the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) or the Eastern and Southern Africa Management Institute (ESAMI).  The cost of something like this could be in the low millions; the effects across the continent could be lasting and significant. 

Want something more ambitious?  Try expanding the models of higher education available in Africa.  There’s nothing like a good Canadian Polytechnic or north European “University of Applied Science” anywhere.  Someone should build and fund one for a decade or so – and spend big so that it’s something people want to emulate.

Not big enough yet?  Well, how about actually creating an African peer-reviewed research fund?  One of the problems with creating genuine African research flagships is that an enormous portion (in some cases as much as 90%) of their research budgets come from donors with specific research agendas.  The money is welcome, but shifting donors priorities make it difficult to develop an indigenous research capacity.  The World Bank’s decision to create a few dozen “African Centres of Excellence” is a step in the right direction, but it’s still in a sense “big science” – why not take the same approach and seed African science through thousands of small ($15-20,000) curiosity-based grants?  $100 million over five years could have a heck of an impact.

Or, finally, there’s the biggest challenge of all: re-designing the African university from the current model where all learning is assumed to happen in the presence of a teacher (and students therefore spend 35-30 hours in class per week), to a more North American model where students are expected to do more on their own and are therefore only required to spend 15 hours per week in class (I’ve written about this in more detail back here.  Quite simply, further massification is going to be impossible unless teaching gets less intense, but tradition and faculty interests make it difficult to see how this process will start.  But using philanthropic dollars to found a half-dozen universities to revolutionize the system?  Teach north-American style with a whole new, leaner production-function?  Now that would be a genuine game-changer, one that would open up enormous new possibilities for the entire continent.