/ 27 May 2011

Fund mooted to boost SADC universities

Fund Mooted To Boost Sadc Universities

Higher education in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries north of South Africa has been plagued for decades by underfunding, weak planning and an academic brain drain that has seriously undermined the region’s research capacity.

The Southern African Regional Universities Association (Sarua) believes a fund should be established to support collaborative research and development initiatives at SADC universities. It will formally propose this to higher-education leaders at next week’s conference of the Association for African Universities in Stellenbosch.

The idea of SADC regional research and the development fund emerged from extensive research Sarua conducted in the past year, which examined the environment in which Southern African universities and university-based research operate. African research activity is dominated by Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, but with relatively poor collaboration between these clusters and a relatively low research output from other African countries.

In Southern Africa, South Africa alone produces more than 80% of SADC’s research output and 89% of the region’s PhDs. Clearly this situation needs urgent intervention. It is now widely acknowledged that universities are the dominant contributor to public-sector research and development.

If the universities are underperforming, the development of countries and particularly of knowledge-based economies will be seriously impeded. Many developing countries understand this, as do most funding agencies in the developed world.

A survey by Sarua of various national and institutional policy documents reveals agreement about the importance of innovation and research, of research collaboration and of the production of PhDs as critical for building research capacity. In spite of this understanding, its translation into an improved environment for research and teaching continues to lag behind other developing regions.

Even in South Africa, for example, the production of PhDs, already low by international standards, is not increasing. But it is the comparison of research output between South Africa and the rest of SADC that gives real cause for concern. As well as this chronic underperformance, there are other factors that underscore the need for the regional research and development fund Sarua will propose.

The first is the fragmentation of research. SADC universities tend to work in isolation from their counterparts in the region and collaboration tends to be biased in favour of universities from the developed world. In Lesotho and Swaziland, for example, foreign researchers (outside Africa) share authorship on every science and engineering article produced. In South Africa 50% of all science and engineering papers are co-authored by foreign academics, compared with 30% in the United States. Intra-regional collaboration would optimise local expertise and knowledge-sharing, and decrease dependency on foreign support.

The second factor is the scattered and uneven ways in which funding is delivered to research initiatives in Southern African universities. A central fund would encourage the sharing of resources based on niches of expertise in our own region, rather than exacerbate current disparities. Besides disbursing money in ways that will benefit the region more directly, the proposed fund would pursue a clear developmental course.

The Sarua proposal will argue that “a stronger emphasis should be placed on developing research collaboration in its twofold function: as a contribution to (regional) knowledge generation and exchange and as a capacity-building measure to support institutional development”. Regional clusters of collaboration for the production of new knowledge are now widely acknowledged as being not only important, especially for universities, but in many respects also essential for optimising shared resources.

The concept of using this research fund to generate new and regionally useful knowledge and to serve as a stimulus for improving the facilities and capacity in teaching and research at previously neglected universities lends real weight to the proposal.

However, Sarua cautions that even with this quantum of investment, “the sustainability of research and development capacity in the region will never be achieved through a fund of the size proposed (an initial target of R100-million has been mooted). It is important that national governments follow through on their commitment to build and maintain strong public universities by reinvesting in these institutions and, in particular, providing adequate levels of funding for basic research.”

The challenge of climate change in Southern Africa provides a powerful example of how the fund might best be used. Sarua’s recently published research document: Climate Change, Adaptation and Higher Education, goes into considerable detail regarding the vulnerability of the region, not least in relation to water availability and food security in the future. It recognises the critical role of universities in contributing to the achievement of a regional developmental agenda.

As stated in the foreword to the research document, universities’ response must go “beyond the outward manifestations of the problem to a critical examination of what this means in terms of curriculum and teaching, research and knowledge production and engagement with communities in the broadest sense”.

Collaborative research through the fund will be a substantial improvement on the current piecemeal approach. Such collaboration would be in the classic South-South mould, as defined by the United Nations Development Programme, regardless of the source of the funding required.

The coordination brought about by the fund would strengthen not only the demand for improved research facilities and budgets at an institutional level, but would also recognise the cross-disciplinary nature of much research and so would give universities the opportunity to advocate jointly on policy matters emerging from their research. Through such improvement, Southern African universities would be able to take their rightful place as intellectual innovators in the affairs of their home countries and their region.

Sarua’s fund objectives
The Southern African Regional Universities Association document sums up the fund proposal by listing its objectives:

  • To strengthen university research capacity within the SADC region;
  • To strengthen the networks between researchers working in SADC, particularly those working in countries that historically have not collaborated despite having good reasons for doing so;
  • To increase research output in areas of specific relevance to the region, including health, infrastructure, social sciences, mining, financial services and -manufacturing; and
  • To increase the output of postgraduates who are well equipped to undertake the development of innovative products and services to meet the needs of the region.

Sarua’s proposal identifies a range of key areas for funding and also highlights a set of six priority focus areas for the initial phase.

Piyushi Kotecha is the chief executive of the Southern African Regional Universities Association