With as much as about USD$17,000 visa deposit requirement by some African countries, the ‘mission impossible’ alarm was bound to be heard sooner than later about internationalisation in university education within Africa. That is what this piece from University World News shows, including a fair awareness of the problems confronting internationalistion on the continent. Read on!
By Maina Waruru
Young people across Africa are eager for educational opportunities that flow from the internationalisation of education and want to benefit from the same exposure as that enjoyed by their international counterparts outside the continent, despite the lack of concrete strategies for advancing the concept in many universities on the continent.
Besides students, young researchers are also increasingly involved in innovations and in international research networks, calling for the expedited crafting of frameworks to guide internationalisation at continental, regional, national and institutional levels.
This realisation and appreciation for the youth’s clamour for international exposure should be enough motivation to push universities and authorities to quickly craft internalisation masterplans, participants of a webinar on internationalisation policy in African higher education, hosted by the Association of African Universities earlier in May, heard.
Plans should follow an analysis of challenges and weaknesses, while leveraging the continent’s strengths such as indigenous knowledge, multilingualism, cultural diversity and the huge young populations – and with national and regional considerations in mind.
Capacity, leadership and structures
While money was important in designing and implementing the plans, coming up with a policy, building capacity and leadership plus establishing the necessary structures were more important and a bigger priority, webinar participants were told.
Policy, leadership and structures would involve features such as an internationalisation chair at a university to lead the process and help implement policy, before looking for money. This is unlike the established and common practices where universities tend to look for money first before making plans, webinar panellists agreed.
“In Africa, we often have difficulties in prioritising issues, but leadership in internationalisation is very important, and a bundled-up approach is not easy,” said Professor Felix Maringe, the deputy vice-chancellor for institutional development, research, and innovation of the University of Kigali, Rwanda. He is also a former assistant dean for internationalisation and partnerships at the faculty of humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
There was “inertia to embrace change” in many universities in terms of picking priorities, and that would not augur well for internationalisation in the institutions, the veteran academic noted.
Giving the example of South Africa, he said that there was popular agitation for decolonisation of the curriculum in 2016, which everybody in the higher education sector agreed was timely, but which leadership in universities failed to prioritise.
“[The] leadership of universities sometimes exists on a different planet, away from both students and the faculty,” he said, adding that, in establishing the leadership to guide internationalisation, universities should leverage existing strengths.
“We have not done enough to leverage on our strengths so far. We have seen slow progress in bringing local languages to the same level as colonial languages. Our dialects have been relegated to minor languages, which is failure to leverage on a major strength,” he noted.
Towards the ‘Continental Education Strategy for Africa’
Continental approach
Despite lingual diversity being a strength in Africa, it was also a barrier and a problem for internationalisation collaborations within the continent, noted Dr Afolake Olanbiwoninu, the acting director of research, innovation and linkages at Ajayi Crowther University, Nigeria.
African countries need to create a policy on internationalisation urgently, and then develop a national framework based on it, which would inform the crafting of a continental document to guide a “coordinated approach” for Africa, she counselled.
National frameworks for internationalisation would guide individual universities on how to design their own roadmaps for internationalisation.
It will be easy to “attract global attention” from scholars and institutions outside the continent if universities embraced concepts such as incorporating indigenous knowledge in the curriculum, to “add value” to internationalisation, she said.
On the other hand, continental frameworks on development and education should be the guide in determining the direction and nature of internationalisation in Africa, according to Professor Khaled Tamzini of the University of Sousse, Tunisia. These include documents like the Agenda 2063 development blueprint, and the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA 26-35).
While, in designing the roadmap for internationalisation funding should come after concrete plans have been put into place, funding remains the biggest and a “chronic” problem for the higher education sector throughout the continent, he said. The challenge is worsened by the absence of “diversified funding”, he added.
Monitoring and evaluation of policies
Internationalisation in Africa was marked by fragmented strategies when each university had its own policy, which was totally different from having diversified strategies. “The impact of this is unused opportunities for collaborations, staff and student mobility, and international partnerships,” Tamzini explained.
While he agreed that multilingualism remained a strength for Africa to exploit, he observed that many universities lacked a system for monitoring and evaluation to track the success of internationalisation, even where it is deliberately practised.
The first step in remedying the problem would be to collect data and assess progress of efforts so far made, and establish internationalisation units as a first step, Tamzini added.
In pursuing internationalisation, Africans must first build capacity locally before even seeking international collaborations.
This would ensure a more “holistic” approach to the ideal, advised Krishna Bista, professor of higher education, department of advanced studies, leadership and policy at Morgan State University, Maryland, United States. The university had established several collaborative initiatives with universities in Ghana and Nigeria, he said.
The surest way for Africa to succeed in the pursuit was to use its own model while also drawing lessons from other countries in Europe and North America he noted.
Bista added that virtual internationalisation, including for curriculum and online joint courses with external institutions of learning, while incorporating indigenous knowledge systems, was one way of getting internationalisation working. On the other hand, researchers could focus on writing projects such as books, he offered.
In taking advantage of already existing structures, Africa can build on these, including open and distance learning universities that have been established in many countries, observed Professor Kazimoto Muyisa of the Open Learning University of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
These include the University of South Africa, or UNISA, and the open universities of Tanzania, DRC and Kenya among others, he added.
