Funding Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

D. Teferra

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349466658, 9781137345776
• eBook ISBN: 9781137345783
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Virtually all countries in the world are struggling to provide the necessary resources to Higher Education. The challenges are particularly complex for economically poor countries in Africa, which have recorded massive expansion in the past decade. This book analyzes the state of funding and financing higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Introduction

Damtew Teferra

The context

Financing higher education is an expensive enterprise – knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and innovation do not come cheap. High-end expertise, expensive equipment and instruments, extensive infrastructure (such as labs, libraries and dormitories) and the accompanying requisite logistics (such as information technology) and a complex academic culture entail that the sector, unlike primary and secondary education, its younger sister subsectors, is costly – without comparison. An argument has been peddled on the high unit cost of higher education for so long – which somehow defies these basic and fundamental facts – it has had a direct and devastating impact on the development of the subsector in the Sub-Saharan region.

Problems surrounding the financing of higher education institutions are worldwide; however, nowhere in the world is financing higher education more problematic than in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to Johnstone (2004), the reasons for this stem from two nearly universal forces. The first is the high and increasing unit (or per-student) cost of higher education. This problem can be attributed to an historically entrenched, tertiary education production function that is both capital and labour intensive and has proven throughout the world to be especially resistant to labour-saving technology. The second force, which greatly exacerbates the financial problems of tertiary educational institutions and ministries in many countries, is the pressure for increasing enrolments, particularly where high birth rates are coupled with a rapidly increasing number of young people finishing secondary school with legitimate aspirations for some tertiary education.

The need (and concomitant pressure on national governments in Africa) to raise enrolment numbers is staggering. In countries where a decade ago ten thousand students attended higher education institutions, that figure has grown many times over to become hundreds of thousands. Uganda, which had some ten thousand students in the early 2000s, now counts more than one hundred thousand. In Ethiopia, where only two universities operated a decade or so ago, there are now more than 30, raising enrolment figures from some forty thousand to over four hundred thousand – a whopping tenfold increase. Even with such massive expansions, the proportion of enrolment in the region stands at 5 per cent, the lowest in the world. The exploding population growth, not commensurate with economic development, will definitely continue to put even more pressure on the higher education system, even as resources are overstretched.

Building a sound higher education system has now emerged as a national imperative if a country is to develop, if not fully compete, in the highly competitive global, social and economic environment. Higher education has always been central to nation building and economic development and is thus universally conceded to be a critical economic engine for prosperity and growth. This driving dynamic is especially the case in the twenty-first century as the world shifts from an industrial-based to a knowledge-based economy, and as the developing world seeks to emerge from its historically crushing dependence on subsistence agriculture and low-wage and unskilled labour (Johnstone & Teferra, 2004).

At no time in history has it been more important to invest in higher education as a major force in building an inclusive and diverse knowledge society and to advance research, innovation and creativity. The past decade provides evidence that higher education and research contribute to the eradication of poverty, to sustainable development and to progress towards reaching internationally agreed-upon development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All. In the emerging knowledge societies, exponential growth in the quantity of knowledge produces an ever-growing gap between those who have access to knowledge and culture – and learn to master them – and those who are deprived of such access. It is not sufficient to reduce the “digital divide” (and other inequalities in access to the world of culture); it is also necessary to reduce the “knowledge divide,” which is liable to grow exponentially (UNESCO, 2005).

According to Constructing Knowledge Societies (2002), a prominent publication of the World Bank – a critical multilateral organisation which has played a prominent, if not always constructive, role in the development of higher education in the Sub-Saharan region due to its now defunct and flawed study – knowledge has been raised as a key driver of growth and development. The study went on to say that countries with higher skill levels are better equipped to face new challenges and master technological discoveries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, qualified human capital remains scarce compared to the continent’s development needs. This situation hinders growth and undermines the foundation for sustainable development. Because skills required for the knowledge economy are built at the tertiary education level, improving tertiary education systems should be high on Sub-Saharan Africa’s development agenda. African tertiary education institutions and policymakers must ensure that the workforce acquires the skills to compete, innovate and respond to complex social, environmental and economic situations. Half a decade later, another World Bank publication, Accelerating Catch up, notes that despite rising enrolment in tertiary-level institutions, the number of students graduating are pitifully small and, despite reform efforts, quality remains well below par (World Bank, 2008).

Higher education is of critical importance to the long-term development of knowledge societies. Universities in particular are vital for conducting research and training researchers and are therefore important for knowledge generation and innovation to meet local and global societal and economic needs. The development and modernisation of higher education are therefore critical issues for governments and stakeholders around the world. It must be ensured that all countries have the higher education capacity to respond to domestic and global challenges in the decades to come. Achieving this aim is particularly challenging where the development of tertiary education has been deliberately neglected, as has been the case in most parts of Africa. Urgent action is needed to ensure that African countries have the necessary tertiary education capacity to respond to the local and global challenges of the future (EUA, 2010).

There is now no doubt that higher education plays a critical, yet elusive, role in development. Thus, for meaningful and sustainable development to take place in the region, there is simply no shortcut to committing adequate resources to the sector – in a sustainable and meaningful manner.

Commitments and shortfalls

As part of the external global paradigm to build the knowledge domain for economic success and competitiveness as well as the internal pressure to expand access and increase enrolment, some countries – such as Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya – are spending huge amounts of their national budgets on higher education expansion and development. Despite such major commitments, the subsector continues to suffer from shortages of resources for effective generation and dissemination of knowledge. In most countries, the buildings and facilities are in disrepair, the laboratories and workshops under-equipped and academic and other staff poorly remunerated.

African higher education faces considerable, and complex, challenges because it is endeavouring to expand access while concurrently struggling to maintain quality – both objectives with considerable financial and logistical significance. Improving academic quality and expanding access do not lie on the same (if not necessarily opposite) trajectories, owing largely to the dynamics of resources.

Prior to the recent mushrooming of private providers, higher education in Africa had virtually been a full preserve of the public domain. Public universities have been deeply reliant on public coffers to offer “free” higher education to all eligible citizens without regard to capacity to pay; however, public coffers have their limits. With the escalating cost of higher education delivery and the simultaneous declining capacity to keep up with this cost, numerous initiatives to mobilise resources – both externally and internally – have been under experimentation. At the national level, governments are vigorously pursuing the cost sharing of higher education with stakeholders, although with some level of reluctance in some countries, largely due to purported or imminent political implications and security threats.

Riding on strong arguments of more “private” than “public” benefits accruing from higher education, the sharing of higher education costs is consolidating its roots in the region. Cost sharing is now gaining ground as an acceptable mode of educational financing in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, although their modalities and efficacy vary considerably. Ethiopia, for instance, has endorsed an Australian model (See Yigezu, Chapter 3) while Zimbabwe has adopted a “Cadetship Scheme” (See Mpofu, Chimhenga & Mafa, Chapter 13). In some countries, such as Malawi and Zambia, however, cost sharing has been either fully rejected or simply ignored. The Malawi case in particular is rather interesting: according to Dunga (See Chapter 8) a disproportionately high student cohort originates from well-to-do families, but the system has been slow to put effective and meaningful cost-sharing policies in place.

Diversifying the resource base

There is growing recognition and a general pattern of acceptance of diversifying resources for higher education beyond the public coffers. Cost sharing is the most common method of diversifying resources. Cost sharing is meant to distribute the cost of higher education across potential beneficiaries, including students, parents and guardians, employers and the public.

One of the common approaches to implementing cost sharing is establishing a loan scheme for students in financial need. The intention is to develop a revolving fund for the loan scheme to help ease the pressure on funding the national higher education system. So far, however, this has been successful in only a few African countries, such as South Africa and, to a certain extent, Kenya. This potentially major resource mobilisation effort has been stifled by numerous factors, including ineffective and poorly equipped management, non-committal executives, unenforceable policies, ineffective collecting mechanisms, poor employment environments, high inflation and devaluation.

At the institutional level, a host of resource-generation activities have been launched. The most common and visible form of resource mobilisation has been the deployment of private programs in public universities. In what is now known as “the privatisation of public universities,” programs for “private” students have become actively operational under Track1-Track 2/Mode I-Mode II regimes. In this arrangement, candidates who could not make it into the tuition-free regular programs enrol as fee-paying students in the parallel programs. In some countries, the number of slots for the regular students, Track I or Mode I students, has over the years been shrinking while the number of fee-paying students, Track II or Mode II students, has increased considerably. For instance, the contribution of fees from Module II students to total university income rose from about 3.8 per cent in 1997–1998 to 33 per cent in 2002–2003 at the University of Nairobi. At Kenyatta University, tuition fees from Mode II students accounted for 48 per cent of the university’s revenues in 2009 (See Oanda, Chapter 5). More dramatically, Makerere University has increased its income from tuition fees from 30 per cent in the 1990s to as much as 80 per cent (Musisi & Muwanga, 2003).

Many institutions have also been establishing businesses as part of, or as entities separate from, the universities’ administration and management. Universities now commonly operate services such as bookstores, cafeterias, farms and facility rentals on a commercial basis. In more advanced cases, such as in Kenya, for example, the University of Moi has a registered limited private company, independent of the institution and run by a CEO.

Once the taboo of privatising the public higher education system was dismantled, institutions began imposing new fee regimes on a variety of services, including registration fees, exam fees, identification card fees, library fees and ICT fees. Institutions have found these internal resource-generation approaches to be less controversial than imposing hefty tuition fees, which are often subject to stiff resistance that draws undue attention from external stakeholders such as politicians, governments and the media.

One noticeable pattern of resource diversification is institutions’ tendency to be slow in effectively exploiting and mobilising initiatives. Universities tend to be less inclined to deploy their academic potential other than intensely engaging faculty in teaching. Needless to say, the tripartite functions of a university ought to be teaching, research and service; all these elements are not yet effectively deployed to enhance resources.

This present volume features the state of funding higher education in nine countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, namely: Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The chapters describe, analyse and critique the state and scope of higher education financing in great depth based on several sources, including surveys, interviews, focus groups and published reports.

Botswana

The only middle-income country represented in this study, Botswana has reached a 17 per cent enrolment rate – one of the highest in Africa. With steady economic growth and political stability for a long period of time, this country of 1.8 million people has managed to expand access over the years, with the anticipated goal of reaching 20 per cent by 2016. The government, under pressure from the anticipated depletion of the diamond bounty, is in the process of deploying the higher education system to raise its global competitiveness (Teferra, 2012).

As part of this vigorous effort, Botswana is establishing, among other initiatives, a brand new international university of science and technology to attract students, faculty and administrators from the region and internationally. About 15 per cent of government expenditure is dedicated to higher education – quite a considerable commitment. Damane and Molutsi extensively explore the higher education terrain in the country with current data, information and analysis, with an eye on funding the system in the present and the future. In light of Botswana’s already high level of government commitment to tertiary education, Damane and Molutsi firmly argue that the source of funding must expand beyond the governmental purse. They also highlight existing inefficient funding modalities in which several ministries are responsible for supporting and funding the tertiary education system.

Ethiopia

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa, has undertaken a massive expansion of its higher education system, even by African standards where this has been a norm. A country with only two public universities in the early 2000s, Ethiopia had more than 30 within ten more years. Private institutions have also seen remarkable growth, from a handful in the early 2000s to more than 60 early in the next decade. The total enrolment figure rose from 40,000 in the early 2000s to more than 400,000 in 2012 (MOE, 2012).

Two chapters on higher education funding in Ethiopia are featured in this volume. Yigezu offers a comprehensive policy analysis on funding patterns, strategies and trajectories in the country, identifying their strengths and failings. He also examines the pattern of expenditure, the role and contribution of donors, the internal and external efficiency and effectiveness of public funding and the modalities of business/industry and university linkages and partnerships.

Yigezu concludes by offering recommendations to improve existing funding policies and strategies as well as strategies to diversify alternative funding mechanisms, including the diversification of the modality of cost sharing. Among other recommendations, he notes that securing sustainable financing for higher education primarily requires the efficient use of available resources, which necessitates the need f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Crisis of a Rich State: Botswana’s Dilemma in Financing Tertiary Education
• 3 Funding Higher Education in Ethiopia: Modalities, Challenges, Opportunities and Prospects
• 4 Revenue Diversification and Resource Utilisation in Ethiopian Universities
• 5 Implications of Alternative Higher Education Financing Policies on Equity and Quality: The Kenyan Experience
• 6 Entrepreneurship as an Alternative Approach to Funding of Public Universities in Kenya
• 7 Challenges and Opportunities of Higher Education Funding Policies and Programs in Madagascar
• 8 Financing Higher Education in Malawi: Prospects, Challenges and Opportunities
• 9 Funding Higher Education in Tanzania: Modalities, Challenges, Prospects and a Proposal for New Funding Modalities
• 10 Funding of Higher Education in Uganda: With Special Emphasis on Donor’s Role and Contribution of National Communities Approaches
• 11 Funding Higher Education in Uganda: Making the Case for the Liberalisation of Student Fees
• 12 Students’ Perceptions of Financing Public Universities in Zambia: Toward a More Sustainable and Inclusive Policy Strategy
• 13 Funding Higher Education in Zimbabwe: Experience, Challenges and Opportunities of the Cadetship Scheme
• 14 Conclusion
• Index