Issue 81

Media Monitoring: Extract of Press News on Higher Education in Africa

1. The Standard Tertiary education should focus on quality, not quantity () The proliferation of a gamut of universities and tertiary institutions churning out tens of thousands of graduates each year is a welcome development in the country’s quest to close the skills gap and set Zimbabwe on the right pedestal in terms of socio-economic development. However, the attainment of this overarching goal can only be enhanced when the government revamps the tertiary education system to move away from the obsession with quantity to delving on quality and the provision of relevant, contemporary and on-demand skills that promote national development. All things being equal, the rejuvenation of tertiary education will create a pool of either highly entrepreneurial graduates or graduates who are employable to steer the country towards the achievement of Vision 2030 goals and other development blueprints. As the International Bureau of Education (2021) pointed out, learning is “the process that brings together personal and environmental experiences and influences for acquiring, enriching or modifying one’s knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, behavior, and world views”. The following recommendations are meant to enhance the “5.0 system” that the government of Zimbabwe has adopted to strengthen the curriculum and change the trajectory of the education sector. Universities and tertiary institutions should regularly come up with programmes that respond to the ever- evolving and diverse needs of the country in particular and the world in general and this can enhance industry-driven programmes that seek to close the skills gap is the way to go in this country instead of turning tertiary institutions into museums and monuments that specialize in offering programmes that were relevant 40 years ago when letters were the most effective and preferable mode of communication. This article will not single out any specific programmes, but what is important to note is that the rationale of a robust education system is to build skills that are aligned to the needs of the country as it seeks to properly equip learners for them to fit into the profile of “jobs of the future” not “jobs of the past”. Read more here

2. University World News Limited vision is why internationalization of HE fails (Global) Harvey Charles and Anthony Ogden’s recent article, “Only experienced international educators need apply”, suggests that it is time for universities to look to the professional cadre of ‘Senior International Officers’ (SIOs) when seeking internationalization leadership. As they point out, parachuting academics and diplomats into the role rarely works and often causes major issues, indicating a lack of understanding of what is an integrated and complex multi-faceted process with inherent contradictions. When I became an SIO I had little direction as to whether my role was primarily to manage international operations, ie to “take care of business”, or to create a deep transformational change in the university culture. This lack of clarity in my own real world example exemplifies the fact that universities themselves often haven’t thought this through – hence the frequent recruitment default to hire someone who has a partial internationalization skillset (usually some form of lived international experience suffices). What is apparent is that when universities recruit to “internationalise”, confusion often ensues. International educators who are job candidates assume this means that their job is to move

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Issue 81 comprehensive internationalisation forward whereas institutions themselves have divergent views on what they actually intend. My field research examined the job descriptions for SIOs in Canadian universities and interviewed incumbents. The data demonstrated a wide span of approaches with some focused on increasing profile and prestige, others on revenue and enrolment, while most simply want international activities to be coordinated, efficient and risk-managed. This smorgasbord of approaches suggests that the reason professional SIOs aren’t always hired is that if a university’s vision is focused on only one aspect of internationalisation, then hiring a professional with a comprehensive skillset is unnecessary. Read more here

3. Anadolu Agency Rwandan university to start Turkish language courses () Turkey’s Yunus Emre Institute, in cooperation with the University of Rwanda, will start Turkish language courses and cultural and academic exchange programs, Turkey’s envoy to the East African nation said on Monday. Ambassador Burcu Cevik told Anadolu Agency in an email interview that a delegation headed by Yavuz Kartallioglu, director of Turkish Language at the Yunus Emre Institute, visited Rwandan capital Kigali from April 12-17 to meet the university’s top officials. Cevik said the institute will soon be sending a lecturer from Turkey to Kigali to start Turkish courses at the university. “Those who are interested in learning Turkish for academic and business purposes will be able to do so soon in Rwanda,” she said, adding that the program will most likely start this year. The diplomat revealed that the Turkish cultural institute and the university signed an agreement on cooperation in December 2019. “The MoU will be implemented with the initiation of Turkish language courses,” she said. Cevik added that Turkey has declared 2021 as "The Yunus Emre and Turkish Language Year," and Turkish courses in Rwanda will help bring people of the two countries closer. Read more here

4. Vanguard News Only universities have powers of admissions, not external body, Uniabuja fires back at JAMB () THE University of has pointedly told the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, that it lacked constitutional powers to meddle in admissions into universities. This was as the university refuted last week’s allegations by the nation’s tertiary institutions’ examination body that it was engaging in “Illegal admissions”, outside the constitutional provisions. Quoting the relevant constitutional provisions guiding the operations of the nation’s university education system, the University of Abuja, in a statement by its Head, information and University Relations, Dr Habib Yakoob, insisted that it was not out of place for it to conduct admissions without JAMB’s input. “The Universities Miscellaneous Provisions, (Amendment) Act 2003 7a (ii) states that “The Senate shall have powers in all academic matters including the organization and control, teaching and research, admission of students…” “What this means is that the university, not any external body, is guaranteed the power of admissions,” the statement read. The statement, tagged:” The University of Abuja is not engaged in illegal admissions” read in full:” The University of Abuja has been constrained to respond to recent reports in the media that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has named the University, among others (curiously unmentioned), as being engaged in “illegal admissions” exercise because it failed to upload the list of its admission on Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS). “The University of Abuja wishes to categorically and emphatically state that it has not conducted any illegal admissions, and has nothing to

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Issue 81 hide as far as its admission exercise is concerned. “It makes bold to state that, at the moment, the University has one of the best and most transparent systems of admission in the country. Read more here

5. Nyasa Times Five of Jacaranda School of Orphans students awarded full scholarships to study Bachelor of degrees in four prestigious African universities () Jacaranda School of Orphans has become the first school in Malawi to be awarded full scholarships to five of its students to study Bachelor of degrees in prestigious African universities in , , and Zimbabwe. The five Bachelor’s degree graduates from Jacaranda are: David Mandiwa (in Biological Sciences at ); Katie Kaonga (Social Sciences at in Zimbabwe); Harry Goliyo (Computer Sciences at African Leadership University in Mauritius); Idah Geoffrey (Entrepreneurship also at African Leadership University in Mauritius) and Franklin Rashid (Applied Computing at United States International University in Kenya). Founder for Jacaranda School of Orphans, Marie da Silva says she feels like a proud mother that after 18 years of keeping orphaned children in school her dream has come true today. “When I started Jacaranda School in my family house, I knew that the children would one day go to college,” she said. “And yes, we have sent more than 100 of our graduates to colleges here in Malawi. “Today, we have students in colleges such as Catholic University; Malawi College of Accountancy; the Polytechnic; Malawi Institute of Tourism; Malawi Adventist University; Malawi Assemblies of God University — just to mention a few. “But I never thought that our students would be receiving full scholarships to international universities in Africa. These students have come a long way with some of them starting school at Jacaranda at 6 years old in Standard 1. “And all were coming from very underprivileged homes. I am very proud of them. Those are amazing scholarships.” She told the kids that when she was growing up, her family “could hardly pay school fees on time and dreams of going to such colleges were not realistic to me or my siblings” Read more here 6. Web

Fire guts administration block of Mampong Technical College of Education (Ghana) Fire has gutted the main administration block of the Mampong College of Technical Education. This occurred in the early hours of Monday, April 19, TV3’s Ashanti Regional Correspondent Evans Nkum reported. Eyewitnesses said some important documents have been destroyed. This comes after a fire ravaged over 40 shops at the Kumasi Central Market with property worth millions of Cedis destroyed by the inferno. The section of the market where hand-made shoes and leather sellers pavilions is said to have been heavily affected by Sunday night’s inferno. Speaking on Akoma FM's morning show GhanAkoma Monday, April 19, Ashanti Regional Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Ghana National Fire Service, DOIII Acquah Desmond, told host Aduanaba Kofi Asante Ennin that “preliminary investigation revealed 40 out of 48 shops within that particular section of the central market [have been affected].” He explained the main cause of the fire was a result of lightning during Sunday night’s downpour in Kumasi, triggering fluctuations in power and the consequent fire outbreak. Read more here

7. Today

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Issue 81

Egypt is racing against time to establish 1st university in New Valley on 1,000 acres (Egypt) CAIRO - 18 April 2020: Four decades ago, the people of the New Valley Governorate had dreamed of establishing a university there. Governor of the New Valley Mohammad al-Zomlout confirmed that the establishment of the New Valley University comes within the government's plan to implement national projects with unprecedented support from the political leadership. Unprecedented funding amounting to billions of pounds is being pumped to bring the state's sustainable development plan to life and build the largest integrated services network in the governorate. The governor added that the governorate's executive bodies have provided all the needed support to the project, in cooperation with the Ministry of Higher Education and all participating state institutions, praising the efforts made by the university administration and work teams to complete the project on schedule. For his part, University President Abdel Aziz Tantawi said that the total cost of the projects being implemented at the New Valley University amounts to approximately LE 1.64 billion. Read more here

8. Times Higher Education Cape Town library collections destroyed in Table Mountain fire The reading room at the University of Cape Town’s historic Jagger library has been “completely gutted” by wildfires spreading from Table Mountain. Thousands of students who live on the Rondebosch campus, which is located on the slopes of the mountain and near where the fires started, have been evacuated and a number of campus buildings have caught fire. The university shared a note from Ujala Satgoor, the UCT Library executive director, which said the fires had wrought “havoc and devastation” on the reading room of the Jagger library, which has resulted in the loss of valuable collections housed in the building. She said the room had been “completely gutted” but fire detection and shutter systems had prevented the fire from spreading throughout the rest of the library. It is not known how much has been lost as “a full assessment can only be done once the building has been declared safe and we can enter”, Ms. Satgoor said. She said it was a “sad day” for the university and the loss would be felt deeply, but the institution would “weather the storm”. In a message to staff and students on 18 April, UCT vice-chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng said all academic activities had been suspended for at least the beginning of the week. “For safety reasons, campus will be locked down and no one, other than emergency services, will be allowed access,” she said. Read more here

9. University World news Global HE can emerge stronger from COVID tsunami (Global) COVID-19 had the force of a tsunami in shaking up university international activities, but higher education is likely to emerge from the pandemic with a greater appetite for global cooperation providing it can navigate around the challenges of geopolitics, according to sector leaders. Vice-chancellors from three continents expressed their optimism that universities will recover from the upheaval caused by the coronavirus crisis with a new sense of purpose and greater understanding that more international collaboration is vital to rebuild a world battered by the pandemic. The message from global university leaders in Australia, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom came at Universities UK International’s International Higher Education Forum 2021 (IHEF 2021) plenary session on

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14 April, which looked at whether systems around the world are radically reforming international activities in response to COVID-19. It was Professor Rocky Tuan, vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who compared the impact of COVID-19 to a tsunami for the way it hit “the fundamental operational mechanism of this knowledge business we are in”. He said it wasn’t just travel and personal contact and interaction that was disrupted – it also encouraged financial turbulence, tribalism, protectionism and exclusionism. “One of the key things the world has to learn from this pandemic is the need for international understanding and partnership. More than ever, the world has learned we have got to work together,” said Tuan. Professor Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor at the University of Cambridge in the UK, began the online debate by saying international collaboration was not just required, it needed accelerating in the post-pandemic world, but he warned that “geopolitics is clearly getting in the way”. Read more here

10. The Conversation Universities in Nigeria must rethink how journalism is taught (Nigeria) Changes in the journalism profession have made journalism education challenging. For instance, the growth of the internet has given everyone the ability to generate and distribute information. This includes news materials and photographs, shared across public platforms without any professional or editorial scrutiny. As a result of this democratisation, journalists are struggling to adapt to this new reality, where they compete daily with a larger society that has blurred the lines between creators and consumers of news. Constant changes in the profession have raised interest in the quality and relevance of journalism education. In these times, university journalism education is becoming increasingly important in shaping journalism practice. Every year, there are more people who take on journalism, armed with formal education and degrees. There are countless debates about how journalism should be taught and learned in formal spaces. Policy makers, journalism professionals, students, educators — everyone is asking questions about the way forward. Stakeholders are becoming more interested in how journalism is taught and learned in the university. A number of journalism studies show that tertiary qualifications are important for journalists around the world. Advancement in tech have brought rapid and radical changes to journalism. This has ramped up pressure on journalism training institutions, as schools struggle to keep up with industry changes. The challenge is this: while the media industry is very welcoming to fast changes, journalism training institutions are primarily conservative spaces, stuck in their ways. Read more here

11. Daily Monitor Rural schools make strides in E-learning () Until digital learning was introduced to Nalongo Church of Uganda Primary School, a UPE school in Luweero in August 2020, Edward had never seen anything close to a computer. He had never seen a tablet either, let alone use it for learning, so when digital learning was introduced in his school, where they would use tablets to learn literacy and numeracy, he was more than thrilled to touch it and learn how to use it. The strategy his school used was home based learning. The learners were collected into clusters depending on where they lived and they would meet in one home with a teacher who would guide them on how to use the learning devices. “The first weeks were the hardest but also most fun. I did not understand the English that the voice on the tablets was using and I did not know how to use it well, which interested me even more to learn. All my friends and I were very excited that they had brought these

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Issue 81 things to us. However, the more I continued using it, and with the help of the teachers, the more I mastered it. I also learned new words that I did not know; to pronounce them, and to spell them,” he excitedly explains. A new day for digital learning. Grace Okia, the education advisor of War Child Holland, the designers of the digital learning technology, says the digital learning innovation is called ‘Can’t wait to Learn’. It is an innovation that has been designed to improve literacy and numeracy skills using the gaming approach to learning. “What this means is that the curriculum (which was endorsed by the National Curriculum Development Centre) for numeracy and literacy was developed into games and uploaded into a computer tablet and as children play these games, they gain competencies in literacy and numeracy. Although it is fit for the lower primary section, it can also be used to improve reading for all children that may need to improve their reading, so it cuts across all levels,” Okia notes. Read more here

12. Biz Community Holistic schools development mitigates Covid-19 impacts (South Africa) The Covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact in 2020 on South Africa's schooling system. Schools had to be closed, from the end of March to June, and teaching and learning time was lost. Despite this and other impacts, the matric class of 2020 proved resilient, achieving a 76.2% pass rate. A 5.1% decline from the 2019 results, it was less severe than Adopt-a-School had anticipated. A study it had conducted in 20 high schools in which it works showed deep effects of the pandemic on learning and teaching. The matric performance analysed in 48 of its programme schools showed a decline by 6% from 2019. Still, this is a pass rate of 80%. The quality of the passes in terms of qualification for university entrance also did not drop against 2019's results, remaining consistent at 40%. Adopt-a-School is a partner entity of Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation and implements a Whole School Development Model in 446 schools currently. Since its establishment in 2002, the foundation has worked in over 600 schools across all nine provinces of South Africa. Adopt-a-School’s survey revealed some of the following practical effects of the pandemic on learning and teaching: Read more here

Note to Editors/PROs: To share news/events about your Universities, contact;

Name: Communications Assistant, Email: Evaline Acan Executive Secretary Office [email protected]

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