Education in Africa: An Administrator's Perspective

As most of the universities and university colleges across Ghana approached closure of their admissions register for Jan 2016 session, they are still busy counting their losses due to sudden downfall in their fresh student numbers after fruitful years since 2013. Throughout the country university council and administrative staffs were busy in formulating strategic plans to increase upon the student enrolments and reduce the expenses to sustain this downfall, they were further shaken by a statement from Head of State of one of the country, which contributes towards a majority share of foreign student population in Ghana. H.E. President of the Republic of Nigeria, Hon. Muhammudu Buhari made his position clear on forex allocation for school fees of Nigerian students studying abroad. As per the President, Nigeria cannot afford to sell forex to parents seeking to fund their children's education abroad. This means that Nigerians will not be able to purchase forex from banks in Nig...

I am in my fifth year of using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing tools for student recruitment campaigns for the college i work with, and i must say it is one of the most efficient tools ever discovered over Internet which provides effective and cost efficient strategy to engage prospective students and draw them into your institution’s recruitment funnel. It all started when i was inclined towards using SEO for attracting more and more search listings for my institution. Having realised that with SEO it can take months before you notice any results, i was looking for options to get instant results and have a greater control over the campaigns which i want to manage with more flexibility, transparency and is targeted. My requirement brought me closer to Google AdWords. Google AdWords is a simple a pay-per-click service which allowed me to create and run ads for my institution. These group of words are clickable and are displayed in Google's search results as well as other websit...

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...