Could a country that has produced fewer than 100 PhDs in the past 50 years turn into a research powerhouse in a decade? It may sound like fantasy but Ethiopia, where more than half the population live on under £1 a day, is giving it a try.
It is a tall order.
Until recently, higher education was reserved for Ethiopia’s elite. Their offspring would go to Europe, the US or Russia as part of the ”sandwich” degrees popular in developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Less than 50 Ethiopian students a year were produced in this fashion and only five or six of them would be vying for a PhD.
”We calculated that we would need 400 years to fill the need of PhD-holders in our country,” says Abye Tasse, vice-president for strategic planning and international affairs at Addis Ababa University (AAU).
PhDs required
Tasse is a man with a plan: to produce 5 000 PhD-holders over the next 10 years. Ethiopia needs PhDs for two reasons, he says. One is to teach its growing number of undergraduates. Twelve years ago, the country had only about 3 000 students. Last year, there were 15 000 students at the AAU alone and 13 new universities were under construction. This explosive growth has produced a shortage of qualified teaching staff. In rural areas, lectures are often given via satellite link or video.
But PhDs are required to carry out research, he adds. Ethiopia’s government hopes that investing in research and development (R&D) will promote socioeconomic development. The new PhD programmes have been designed to meet the country’s development needs in areas such as peace and security, food production, biodiversity and urban growth. The Ethiopian government budget is straining under many conflicting pressures and although it will be footing some of the bill for the PhD bonanza, it is also seeking funding from international aid agencies.
Another problem is finding academic supervisors for the new PhDs. There are not enough senior academics in Ethiopia, so teachers will be flown in from overseas. It will be expensive, says Tasse, but more productive than flying students out of the country as in the past. ”Rather than sending one student we can bring colleagues from abroad to teach 10 to 15 students.”
Foreign tutors will come for a few months and teach full courses in blocks to save time and money. Aron Mujumdar, a law graduate from Alabama, knows what they will face when they get there. He has been teaching law students in Addis Ababa on and off since 2005. It has not made him rich, he says, but it has been a life-enriching experience.
One challenge, he says, has been to encourage independent thought in a country where memorisation plays a big part in education. Mujumdar recalls flunking a pair of students in a closed-book exam for reproducing, verbatim, lecture notes. When the students protested that they had written their answers from memory, Mujumdar challenged them to learn, in three days, another text of the same length. Both students passed the test. ”I was floored,” says Mujumdar.
Ethiopia’s push to produce more free thinkers may seem at odds with its reputation as an oppressive regime. The media is censored and rumours of vote-rigging followed the 2005 elections.
Academic freedom is upheld as a ”core value” in the AAU’s strategic plan, and Tasse and his colleagues are lobbying the Ethiopian government for more fiscal freedom. But the path to freedom may prove long and tortuous, says a Rwandan academic who wished to remain anonymous. ”Like many universities in Africa, the AAU is still under government control.” —