Education in Africa: An Administrator's Perspective

Imagine yourself two decades back, when you would have expressed your desire to choose a career in fashion designing like one of your relative, managing a boutique. You would have been scolded by your parents on your aspiration to become like a tailor. I also got scolded when i opted to take a stint into fashion training just after my senior high schools in early 1990s. It was an era when most of the high school graduates were interested or counseled to opt for computer science, medicine or engineering at tertiary level. But thanks to my parents as they agreed for me to opt for designing, which was then emerging in India in 1994 and lot of youngsters (both female and male) were opting fashion, textile and graphic design as full time careers. We suddenly saw a host of private institutions with international tie-ups setting up fashion design schools in major cities with good number of students opting to study there. Now i realise the mantra behind their success in early years. It was t

With the increase in number of students applying for higher education in Africa, accurate access to information related to available universities on the continent has become a challenge for users. Most of the search engines or portals available are not Africa based and don’t have access to information from universities, hence updated information on programmes available, admission dates, results announced and other campus related activities are not available. A student in higher education institution want to gain access to continent wide and global information about all activities in other peer institutions. I tried searching through the information online for HE institutions across continent, and not to my surprise i had to search through multiple sites for multiple days before getting scattered and not up-to-date information  about institutions on the continent. My main interest was to look for a central point of information for most of the HE institutions. Yes, most of these inst

One of the biggest tasks for an HR team is to shortlist CVs which are relevant to the jobs posted, in case, if the applications are received through a non-filtered job portal. In the continent i work, due to emergence of economies and increased availability of university education resulting into more number of graduates from universities in all fields, numbers of applications for all types of jobs are in hundreds. It does not mean that the unemployment is high, but it signifies that graduates are now available more than what it used to be a decade back for skilled jobs. I see that as a good trend. Since highest paid jobs and highest number of jobs openings are STEM jobs, which involve the fields of science, technology, engineering or math, do these graduates possess soft skills which are essentially required along with their domain specific knowledge. During my interaction with numerous job seekers in interviews, I realized that most of the applicants are good in their area of st

As we witness the start of 2016 today, I am sure all of us in the education sector in Ghana would have done their analysis of business performance for 2015, which was affected by Ebola, impact of low oil prices on the economy, currency devaluation across Africa and many other factors which were not in an institution’s control. One of the major factor which impacted university enrollments across Ghana was turbulence in Nigerian economy. I am sure all of us agree on the fact that majority of the international students studying in Ghanaian private colleges (university colleges) are from Nigeria, any disturbance there is having a direct impact on the enrolment graphs in Ghana. Despite these challenges, there were institutions that performed well by introducing innovative ideas in their recruitment and retention strategies. I remember one of the well-known institutions in Accra with majority of foreign students partnering with a bank to complete student’s verification process on their