Step up knowledge creation in Africa, Asia and the Middle East

Countries in developing regions must step up higher education to a level where their people are creators rather than merely consumers of knowledge, a major conference on international higher education heard this week.

At the same time, higher education and research must help countries in Africa, Asia and the Arab region to address local as well as global challenges, by collaborating with one another and with the West and by incorporating indigenous knowledge into research to better meet local needs.

Mohammad Fathy Saoud, president of the Qatar Foundation, threw down a challenge for the Arab region in an address at the British Council’s Going Global conference held in Dubai from 4-6 March: “We are great consumers of knowledge, not generators.

“We have been concerned that our region is playing a very modest role in the generation of knowledge,” he said.

This had been echoed earlier by Tanveer Naim, a consultant with the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Research and Training of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC.

She said that the 57 members of the OIC accounted for just 2.1% of the world’s research. “China is ahead of all the OIC countries combined,” said Naim. Higher education enrolment was 19.5%, compared with 30% for developing countries.

“Rising fundamentalism in our countries is because we have neglected to provide equal opportunities for everyone, including in education,” she added.

For example, Pakistan had made investment in its urban infrastructure a priority: “They do very little for the rural population,” she said.

Local needs

A big issue for many speakers was how global partnerships in higher education and research could help meet local needs.

Qatar Foundation’s Saoud said: “We realised the importance of creating our own framework and strategy for research. This is something you can’t import.”

Priorities were identified, in consultation with industry, business and labour market experts. On the other hand, research was by nature international. “We can’t do it on our own,” he said.

The Qatar Foundation strategy had been to partner with leading universities in the West. But its new focus is also on building relations with countries like China, India, Singapore and Malaysia.

“Many of these countries share our objectives, values and ambitions. They are already succeeding on the global front. We would like to be part of that.”

Shigeharu Kato, director-general of international affairs in Japan’s Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology, told the conference how Japanese engineering education was being “transplanted” to the Muslim world, in Malaysia and Egypt, involving collaboration between governments and consortia of institutions.

Through the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology programme in Egypt and the Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology programme in Malaysia – both launched in 2010 – engineering departments, courses and laboratories had been established based on local needs and strategies but using Japan’s laboratory and project-based approaches.

“Indigenous knowledge is incorporated through joint curriculum development, mixed faculty, joint supervision of graduate research, and links with industry,” he said.

Bill Buenar Puplampu, dean of the Central Business School at Central University College in Ghana, said more support was needed for local models and research. For example, a number of participants questioned the relevance of Western models of business education.

He cited different concepts of land ownership, as well as the role of family networks in business, as examples of differences that were hard to accommodate in Western-style business education.

Indigenous knowledge

The local theme was also picked up by Goolam Mohamedbhai, former vice-chancellor of the University of Mauritius and former secretary general of the Association of African Universities.

He made a powerful case for Africa to embed indigenous knowledge systems in its development strategies, while also using the technological experiences of the North.

“Africa has a rich body of indigenous knowledge, used for hundreds of years to solve developmental and environmental problems,” he said.

There was an urgent need to protect and document indigenous knowledge by creating a database and dedicated centres at the institutional and national levels – if reluctance among scientists, politicians and development agencies to indigenous know-how could be overcome.

Mohamedbhai also cited opportunities for collaboration with China and India, which he said had good models for protecting and using indigenous knowledge.

However, Gerald Wangenge-Ouma, professor of higher education studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, argued that the weak academic cores of many African universities limited their capacity to generate local or global knowledge – for teaching, research and training the next generation of academics.

Universities in Africa suffered from a brain drain of talent and scarcity of skills, he said. Policies and initiatives to encourage the return of skill emigrants had largely failed.

Using the diaspora

Countries and institutions should make more systematic use of their diasporas to strengthen the academic core, said Wangenge-Ouma.

Around 30,000 Africans within the diaspora trained to doctorate level could, for example, contribute to joint research and co-supervision of graduate students, and take up adjunct appointments and visiting lectureships or research chairs.

Such collaborations tended to be based on informal networks and relationships, and he called for more systematic, institutional approaches, pointing to some examples such as the South African Diaspora Network and Economic Research Southern Africa.