18 3.1 INTRODUCTION
All over the world, higher education is currently faced with great challenges and difficulties related to financing, equity of conditions at access into and during the course of studies, improved staff development, skills-based training, enhancement and preservation of quality in teaching, research and services, relevance of programmes, employability of graduates, establishment of efficient cooperation agreements and equitable access to the benefits of international cooperation. At the same time, higher education is being challenged by new opportunities relating to technologies that are improving the ways in which knowledge is produced, managed, disseminated, accessed and controlled.
African universities in particular, are struggling to emerge from a decade of crisis. A number of challenges – rapid growth, the brain drain, frequent labour strife, campus closures, institutional deterioration, waning relevance and declining educational quality – have produced a generation of graduates feared to be less capable and qualified than they were ten years ago. Research, a hitherto core function of the university system, has virtually ceased at many of these institutions. At stake is whether African nations will be able to guide their own development and manage their own affairs in the years ahead.
It must, however, be acknowledged that higher education, as the principal venue for knowledge creation and dissemination, occupies a very special space in any society’s development agenda, as it has the function of fostering the capacity of individuals and communities to embrace democratic principles, to uphold human rights, and to promote sustainable development. Particularly in Africa and the rest of the developing world, higher education institutions must be poised to create the human capital necessary to keep pace with the knowledge revolution.
The continent is generally lagging behind in the important question of providing adequate higher education opportunities for its inhabitants. Yet it is realised that without addressing these challenges adequately, we may not be able to find reasonable course of action to ensure that higher education will provide adequate solutions the socio-economic problems facing our society. Allow me to give a brief outline of some of the major issues that need to be addressed if the continent must move forward in its higher education agenda.
