Education in Africa: An Administrator's Perspective

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 ...

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 ...

After putting my thoughts together to start writing blogs on education scenario in Ghana, I encouraged myself to start with my own experience of encounters with academia in last few years. One of the topics making round in the academic circle nowadays is critical thinking. Suddenly in the last couple of years, this “new” thinking approach has gained a lot of momentum in content development in private universities of Ghana. By heading one of private colleges here, I was also not left untouched with this force of critical thinking. I have always believed since my early days of career, that to think critically on any of the issues is a way to make effective and well informed decisions. Through my interaction with numerous programme panels across multiple content development and approval processes, I was really energized by the strength in which almost all members emphasized on the importance of teaching Critical Thinking across all undergraduate programmes in Ghana. I also total...