N Pandor: Global Perspectives in Education Workshop

1 October 2007

Professor Balintulo, Walter Sisulu VC
Doctor Thelma Thompson, President, University of Maryland Eastern Shore
Workshop participants

It is an honour and a privilege to welcome you to this workshop and to
welcome you to South Africa.

Professor Balintulo is a native of the Eastern Cape and I am sure he will
tell you a little about his province during the course of the workshop. Like
most countries, South Africa has regions of fast economic growth and high
employment opportunities and other regions where growth declines or stagnates
for a range of reasons. In our case the economic power lies to the north of us
in Gauteng, which the foreigners among you should visit. If you get the chance,
go and see Maropeng, the cradle of humankind, and even have your
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tested so that you can have proof of where you come
from.

The Eastern Cape is not one of our regional economic power houses, although
it used to be in pre-colonial times and even into the early years of apartheid.
Yet it occupies a special place in our country's history. It is home to a
number of famous schools and universities. One university, in particular, is
not yet famous but we certainly hope that it will become famous in time. It is
today something of an experiment, Walter Sisulu, in that it is a comprehensive
institution.

Perhaps Americans are familiar with this institutional form? It is a new
type of institution here in South Africa. Its aim is to bridge the gap between
the old traditional research universities and the vocational universities that
we call universities of technology, so that it can offer different types of
programmes in combination with one another.

Our future success depends on the quality of graduates that our
comprehensive universities and university of technologies produce in this
current period of immense economic expansion in South Africa.

It is Professor Balintulo's task to shape Walter Sisulu into an educational
powerhouse in the Eastern Cape. I am sure he will tell you that his problems
lie in a shortage of money and a shortage of good students, the best Eastern
Cape matriculants choose to study outside the province. Both of these problems
are not insurmountable. In government we are giving close attention to
improving university finances and to encouraging pupils and students not to
seek their futures and fortunes further south and further north.

We live in a time in which the tertiary education sector is expanding
exponentially and students have choices little dreamed of in our days as
students. That expansion has meant that education has become big business.

Only last month a British Council report in the United Kingdom revealed that
education is worth more to the United Kingdom than banking. It is even more
remarkable when you remember that education is still provided largely by
governments.

Clearly this makes education vital to the United Kingdom economy, and in
particular, it makes international students and the tuition fees they pay vital
to the United Kingdom economy.

Martin Davidson, Chief Executive of the British Council, said:
"Fundamentally, this report shows the shift of axis of our education system
from one that operates predominantly domestically to one that operates on a
truly international basis. However, our position is vulnerable. Unless we start
taking education much more seriously as a global business, we will lose out to
other countries who understand the value of education to their economy much
better than we do."

Now that is a warning to us all.

United Kingdom earnings have increased from international students, but the
United Kingdom's share of the global international student market has
declined.

The United States of America still dominates the market in international
students, despite the rise of universities in South and East Asia, where China
and India are producing four million graduates a year.

So there is intense competition for international students, and perhaps this
workshop is a small sign on the importance of this type of student in our
domestic education systems.

We have only about 50 000 international students studying in our
universities, out of 760 000 students, not including those many student birds
of passage who stop by for a month or three to complete a component of degrees
taken in their countries. These numbers are a substantial increase on the mere
5 000 we had in 1994.

We have not quantified the contribution of the 50 000, but the contribution
they make to South Africa comes in much more important ways than the purely
financial.

It is about this that I want to say a few words in my welcoming remarks to
you.

All of our public universities have partnerships with sister institutions
across the globe. These relationships include staff and student exchanges,
support for capacity building, and research linkages. They are partnerships
between peers, shaped for mutual benefit and not for commercial purposes.

Our international partnerships in higher education have also played an
important role in helping to reduce the accumulated effects of years of
isolation from the global community during apartheid.

I cannot emphasise enough the difference international staff and students
make to our higher education system.

Our institutions are enriched by increased diversity. Students do not just
learn from books and professors. They learn from all the different people they
meet.

Also, diversity plays a key role in transforming our higher education
system.

As you may be aware, we have transformed the institutional landscape of
higher education and rearranged the spatial geography of apartheid that
reserved the best places and resources for whites and left the worst and often
rural outposts for black colleges.

Black students and black female students are now in a majority at our
institutions and I am pleased to say that most graduates are now black and
female as well.

But the process of transformation is not static. It does not wait for change
to happen.

We find that the most difficult thing to change is institutional culture,
that way of doing things, those invisible patterns of power and influence that
determine the way a thing should be done. And that is where we can learn from
students and academics, which bring fresh perspectives.

This positive diversity helps democratic South Africa by ensuring that our
commitment to Africa and to African solutions is reflected in the culture,
organisational ethos, and curriculum framework and content of our higher
education institutions.

One of the consequences of hosting international students is that they often
remain in the countries where they study. It appears that students from
developing countries tend to stay in their alma mater countries, while students
from advanced countries tend to go home.

The United States is the magnet for students and skilled workers in the
world today. Sending countries have not been successful in luring academic
emigrants home.

The International Organisation for Migration estimates that some 300 000
professionals, and millions of others, from the African continent live and work
in Europe and North America. And of course our loss is worst in the science and
technology fields.

There are policies that countries can adopt to combat this, and we look to
the success of Korea and Ireland in fostering return migration as key
examples.

These successes have largely been attributed to the growth of domestic
investment in science and technology innovation. We are working on encouraging
new linkages and activities in the African Diaspora at the moment and we look
forward to significant developments in the immediate future.

Regional meetings of the African Diaspora have been held recently. The
regional meetings have deliberated on the developmental challenges confronting
the continent and have promoted collaborative partnerships in finding solutions
to these and in integrating the intellectual resources on the Diaspora in this
process.

These meetings have paved the way for a Summit in 2008 of all regions of the
Diaspora and all African Heads of State.

In closing, I trust that in the coming days you will give close attention to
the key educational policy issues of international education: quality, access
and equity, cost, and the contribution of education to growth.

An important matter for you to consider in this workshop is the issue of the
cost of providing the international experience that we would like Africans to
gain. At present this is very difficult for many African countries and thus
international programmes tend to be reliant on donor support.

We need to investigate the support that can be given by African governments
for Africans to gain the international experience that will build African
education systems and African institutions of higher learning.

We still have a great deal to do in developing and consolidating shared
research partnerships between African institutions and the African
Diaspora.

The workshop must consider African perspectives and emerging challenges in
several important areas.

These include:

* the challenges that Africa faces in providing education access beyond
primary education, since many African systems have made significant progress in
achieving access to primary schooling
* the development of capacity to ensure that education systems are able to be
effective planned and financed
* And particularly, strengthening the capacity and expertise in the public
service administration of education and social services.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Education
1 October 2007