Education in Africa: An Administrator's Perspective

Today, Africans are the architects of their development, not just beneficiaries. The new model for development  is focussing on partnerships — with African governments, businesses, universities and civil society. But Africa will continue to be held back if we do not immediately invest in research and development. It was agreed at the African Union Heads of State summit in 2006 that African governments should target 1% of their GDP spending on research and if that target is not met continent’s development will be stalled. We must join hands with strong and credible international partners to invest in local research. Without funding and the necessary regulatory environment and policies, the benefits of the scientific results emanating from research work won’t be harvested. As private university college we fully support the same and has already taken significant steps to catalyze the growth. Africa as a continent is growing with fast pace. Astute international in...

Since last one decade or more, government across Africa has realised the importance of investment in building broadband capacity as a tool to economic development and this policy has been the centre to their growth policy. As per World Bank, for every 10 percent penetration of broadband in a developing economy, there is typically 1.38 percent increase in GDP. Access to internet in Africa is more influenced by mobile penetration, as more and more people tend to use their mobile phones to access internet, than their computers. Mobile penetration in some of the African countries are as high as 119%, which provides an excellent opportunity for businesses and organisations to reach them through mobile.  Cloud Computing as per the US National Institute of Science and Technology is “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rap...

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 ...