Abstract:
Over the past two decades African higher education has undergone profound changes. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities on the continent were few in number, small in scale, and elitist institutions with the limited mandate of producing cadres for the Africanization or indigenization of the newly independent state apparatuses. In the 1980s and 1990s, during the heyday of structural adjustment programs, they were regarded as costly irrelevances at best, or bastions of political unrest at worst. Now, they are seen as essential for the creation of knowledge economies and societies, indispensable for human capital development, and turning Africa’s unprecedented youth bulge into a demographic dividend rather than a Malthusian nightmare. Yet, the continent’s higher education sector is plagued by huge capacity deficits and challenges that threaten its survival, sustainability and contribution to the continent’s historic and humanistic project for democratic and development transformation. Since the late 1990s I’ve been immersed in research on African universities and knowledge production on Africa. I’ve published several books and numerous articles and given dozens of conference presentations on these subjects. The books include two edited volumes on African Universities in the Twenty-First Century (2004) and another two volumes on The Study of Africa (2008). Among the presentations, the most significant might be the Framing Paper I was commissioned to write for the 1st African Higher Education Summit held in Dakar, Senegal in March 2015.