Table of Contents

INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

Shifting Demographics in Sub-Saharan Africa

Juma Shabani
Juma Shabani is the director and representative of the UNESCO Harare Cluster Office in Zimbabwe, with responsibility for Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. E-mail: j.shabani@unesco.org.

According to various population assessments and projections, the world population will grow significantly in the next few decades. In sub-Saharan Africa, despite the increase in mortality caused by various diseases—in particular, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria—several analyses and projections based on fertility and mortality rates and migration indicate that population growth will continue to increase. Indeed it is projected that Africa's share of the world population, which increased from 8.9 to 12.8 percent during the period from 1950 to 1995, will rise to more than 18 percent by 2050. This population growth will pose a major challenge to higher education institutions in terms of access.

In sub-Saharan Africa, despite the rapid growth in student enrollments in the past two decades, all the indicators used to measure the level of development of a higher education system show that higher education is the least developed in the regions of the world. Moreover, the enrollment patterns of higher education institutions in Africa reveal a major underrepresentation of groups such as women, people living in rural areas, and learners with special needs. Therefore, one of the major challenges facing African governments is to widen access to higher education significantly enough to cope with rapid population growth and to address the needs of underrepresented groups. This challenge is exacerbated by the anticipated increase in demand for higher education that will result from the successful implementation of UNESCO's Education for All goals.

Ensuring a 40 to 50 percent enrollment rate of the relevant population group is necessary for a country to perform effectively in a competitive world. Even though several developed countries have already achieved this percentage, in most developing countries, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa, the enrollment rates are lower than 5 percent.

In addition to the anticipated increase in traditional student enrollment rates, globalization has led to the emergence of new training needs and pedagogic delivery modes. This means that further demand for higher education will come from adult learners seeking lifelong learning, refresher courses, and study programs leading to internationally recognized qualifications. In sub-Saharan Africa higher education institutions are also compelled to train huge numbers of unqualified primary and secondary school teachers and to strengthen teaching capacity at all levels in HIV and AIDS prevention education.

Under these circumstances, higher education institutions in Africa need to revisit their policies, structures, and operations to meet the demands for access and the requirements of more diverse learners—including part-time students, entrepreneurs, primary and secondary school teachers, and students with special needs. This challenge is being addressed through revision of curricula; capacity building in pedagogy; new modes of higher education delivery; innovative open, distance and technology-mediated learning; revised or new quality assurance and accreditation frameworks; and innovative approaches to transform brain drain into brain gain.

New Modes of Higher Education Delivery
Several African countries have established open and distance education programs to respond to the increase in demand and the needs of the new types of learners. These include departments of distance education in traditional universities, the Open University of Tanzania, the Open University of Zimbabwe, the National Open University of Nigeria, and the Zambian Open University. Many other countries are in the process of setting up similar institutions. Several other higher education providers located both in Africa and overseas are offering cross-border study programs through intensive use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). These include the African Virtual University (AVU), the Francophone Virtual Campuses, the University of South Africa, and overseas universities mainly based in Australia, the United Kingdom, and France.

For example, the AVU has transformed from a World Bank project to an independent organization with 57 learning centers in 27 African countries. The AVU set up partnerships with four major institutions overseas—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia), the Universit? Laval (Canada), and the Indiana University of Technology (United States)—to develop learning resources and offer a variety of degree programs to African learners through selected African universities like the University of Addis Ababa and the University of Dar es Salaam.

Support of Higher Education and ICTs in Education
In Africa, support of higher education has been reaffirmed through two major decisions—namely the inclusion of higher education in the seven-core programs of the action plan for the implementation of the African Union Decade of Education in Africa (2006?2015) and the decision taken by the African Development Bank to establish a division of higher education, science and technology, and vocational education.

While the use of ICTs, in particular Internet and e-learning, has helped to widen access to higher education in Africa and to address the needs of new learners, there are still a number of factors hampering expansion of technology-mediated learning. These include limited infrastructure and skills and high costs of computers and software. Hopefully these issues are currently being addressed by African governments in collaboration with major ICT-stakeholders. Current initiatives being undertaken to improve ICT infrastructure and skills include construction of the East African submarine fiber cable to help close the fiber optic ring around Africa; the New Partnership for African Development e-school initiative to provide ICT equipment, skills and knowledge, and Internet connectivity to primary and secondary school students in 600,000 schools across Africa; and the One Laptop per Child project involving several African countries.

In conclusion, the demand for access to higher education will increase significantly in the next few years due to the rapid population growth and the impacts of globalization. This situation will pose at least two major challenges to African governments—namely, developing and sustaining ICT infrastructure and skills for the expansion of technology-based delivery modes and enhancing the quality of higher education provision. The various initiatives highlighted in the previous section indicated that the challenge of ICT infrastructure and skills is being addressed adequately. The issue of quality is being approached at least through two major strategies—the adaptation of existing quality assurance and accreditation frameworks in response to the emerging delivery modes or the development of new ones and the reversal of the phenomenon of brain drain.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number47/p16_Shabani.htm