N Pandor: Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA)
Workshop

2 April 2009

Programme director
Chief Executive Officer of SARUA, Ms Piyushi Kotecha
Chairperson of SARUA, Prof BJ Otlhogile
Members of SARUA's Executive Committee
Vice-Chancellors
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen

Thank you for inviting me to this important workshop.

Let me start by congratulating the Southern African Regional Universities
Association (SARUA) on the achievements of this organisation after such a short
period of its existence.

SARUA gives effect to the SADC Protocol on Education and Training signed in
1997 by more than ten member countries. The key objective of this protocol is
to provide a framework for regional co-operation in addressing regional
educational needs. The protocol was signed two years before the Europeans
signed the Bologna Declaration, which has similar aims to our protocol.

The studies conducted by SARUA, which will be reported at this workshop in
the next two days, are the first in a series that should guide us on what we
should be doing to give effect to the protocol. The studies should also guide
us on how we strengthen higher education more broadly by pooling our collective
strengths. They deal with important issues.

First of all, access to higher education is far too low in all our
countries. Access to higher education has been a challenge in developing
countries for many years. According to the latest figures of the World Bank,
the gross participation rate in tertiary education in sub-Saharan Africa is
only 6,1%, whereas that of North Africa is 26,6%.

The average Southern African Development Community (SADC) higher-education
participation rate is approximately 5%,1. United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has reported that the growth rate
in enrolments in higher education in sub-Saharan Africa is among the highest in
the world. Yet participation rates remain very low.

The other side to the access challenge is that too many students are leaving
SADC countries to study abroad. Within our own region, the movement of students
is largely in the direction of South Africa, which we welcome but is cause for
concern. South African universities currently enrol some 60 000 international
students. Of these, more than 40 000 are from the SADC region.

Internationalisation is good for knowledge and skills transfer, and can be
beneficial for the higher education system in the region. However, there is a
‘brain-drain' problem. Currently we do not have proper systems in place to
monitor the mobility of people in and out of the region. Of course, it is not
only students who leave their countries, but also academics and other
professionals such as nurses, teachers and engineers.

My view has always been that we should try to improve the conditions within
our own borders to make sure that we retain the best of our students and
academics in our countries. We should also pay attention to ensuring that
within SADC, we promote genuine 'brain-circulation'.

It's encouraging to note that many SADC countries have in place or are in
the process of setting up higher education quality assurance structures. Strong
national quality assurance structures and processes are a precondition for the
building of regional quality assurance systems.

Quality is a many sided process. But a lack of adequate infrastructure is a
problem in many of our universities. For instance, it is still common in some
institutions to find more students per class than the capacity of the lecture
room. Therefore, in the ideal situation, the increase in enrolments should be
followed by necessary infrastructural change.

Of course, quality improvement is dependent on funding. Several countries
within the African continent have increased investment towards developing the
higher education system in the past decades.

According to a report that was presented last year to African Ministers of
Finance, enrolments in African universities tripled between 1991 and 2005,
expanding at an annual rate of 8,7%, which is one of the highest regional
growth rates in the world. However, over a 25 year period, the spending per
student declined from an average of US $6,800 per year to a low of US $981 in
2005 for 33 countries.

One of the very substantial achievements of the South African government has
been to halt the decline in per capita funding that occurred in the ten years
before 2006. We need to take stock of our funding policies to make sure that
they respond to the needs of the region. In the SADC region, the national
expenditure on education as a percentage of gross national income varies
between two percent and ten percent.

The case for improved funding provision for higher education will certainly
be strengthened if, as a region we work hard to ensure that we have strong and
stable institutions that are able to respond to the many challenges that we
face, including the contribution of higher education to the economic and social
development of our nations and region. This brings me to the issue of
leadership.

It's important that we develop good, visionary leadership across our
institutions. At the same time, we need to be mindful of the equity aspect
amongst our leaders.

Currently, leadership in higher education across the SADC region, and to a
certain extent, elsewhere in the world, is dominated by males. Comparative
research shows that there is a notable under-representation of women at senior
and leadership levels of universities even in developed countries such as the
United States and Australia. The male domination trend is also evident within
the academic staff profile.

Institutions should therefore begin to take cognisance of this in their
succession planning. As a region we also need to increase our postgraduate
student production. Currently, the number of postgraduate students that
graduate from our institutions annually, particularly at doctoral level, is
very low compared to that of developed countries.

We need to build capacity in all areas of research. One of the obvious
capacity constraints is a lack of PhD supervisors. For us to increase the
number of PhD graduates, we must first develop the supervisory capacity at our
institutions. The situation now is that we have too many academics without
doctoral qualifications. This is, of course, why many postgraduate students go
abroad.

Postgraduate studies can also be supported by way of regional collaboration,
through, amongst others, joint programmes and supervision. Such collaboration
can also be extended to include international partner institutions. A number of
models exist of such partnerships including the South Africa-Norway Tertiary
Education Programme which has promoted joint postgraduate programme development
by universities in the region.

I am also aware that the issue of internet connectivity is high on SARUA's
agenda. Access to high speed connectivity for all of our universities is the
key to strengthening teaching and learning and enabling collaborative
partnerships in the region and beyond.

In closing, I would like to re-iterate the importance of the publication
that is launched and discussed here today, and I have no doubt that the
publication will have a positive impact on the higher education landscape in
the region. I hope that many more studies will emerge as a result, even from
researchers from outside the SARUA association.

Thank you

Issued by: Department of Education
2 April 2009
Source: Department of Education (http://www.doe.gov.za)