Higher Education and Africa’s Development Agenda

Abstract

Professor Issa Shivji, Director of the Nyerere Resource Center, Mr Joseph Sinde Warioba, former Prime Minister, Mr Mohamed Bilal former Vice-President, distinguished guests, colleagues, thank you for the singular honor of inviting me to give the 3rd Nyerere Dialogue Lecture. When I received the invitation I readily accepted because of the high regard I have for Professor Shivji, one of our most esteemed public intellectuals, and because it is named after the towering and incomparable statesman and Pan-Afrcanist, Julius Nyerere, the founder President of Tanzania. President Nyerere was one of Africa’s few philosophger-kings, whose profound thoughts on the historic and humanitistic agenda of African nationalism, namely, decolonization, development, democratization, nation-building, and regional integration remain as compelling as ever. In this presentation, I seek to explore the intertwined challenges facing African higher education and the prospects for sustainable development. Both universities and development across the continent are undergoing complex and contradictory changes that reinforce and reproduce social inequalities that threaten for the humanistic and historic dreams of the nationalist and pan-Africanist project for self-determination, democratization, development, nation-building, and regional integration. As it happens, my last two books deal with these issues in greater depth: Africa's Resurgence: Domestic, Global and Diaspora Transformations (2014) and The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945-2015 (2016).1 I begin by looking at the changing contexts of African development, in which the transformations in the higher education sector and the sector’s contributions can productively be located. In this regard, I interrogate the narrative of Africa rising, its manifestations, and key dynamics. This is followed by an examination of the major changes taking place in African higher education, which are part and parcel of the broad shifts taking place around the world. I conclude by trying to link the two, suggesting some of the ways in which higher education and the development project can be mutually reinforcing in the construction of inclusive, integrated, innovative and sustainable democratic developmental states and societies on our beloved continent.