Subject: Fw: Chron of Higher Ed - Big Foundations' Africa Partnership Offers Lessons for U.S. Universities
The Partnership in Higher Education in Africa, comprising seven foundations, gave $279-million over 10 years to assist universities and scholars in nine countries. An additional $161-million supported programs in multiple countries.
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May 1, 2011
Big Foundations' Africa Partnership Offers Lessons for U.S. Universities
By Ian Wilhelm
After 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, a major philanthropic effort to develop African higher education ended last year, leaving behind a string of accomplishments and some lessons on how American universities can help their African counterparts.
Consisting of seven American foundations, the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa provided $440-million to institutions and scholars in nine countries, making it one of the largest international efforts to assist universities in Africa. While the philanthropies will continue to support African academic programs separately, they dissolved their collective effort in 2010 in part because of leadership changes at some of the grant makers.
The partnership is credited with expanding Internet access and e-learning at universities, establishing advocacy and research networks, building laboratories and science facilities, creating opportunities for young African scholars, and enrolling more women and disadvantaged students in colleges, among other achievements.
The coalition had its fair share of problems, too. An unusually candid report produced by the foundations at the end of the decade-long project says the partnership lacked clear goals, had an inefficient decision-making process, and did not do enough joint grant making to try to solve big problems in African higher education.
At Uganda's Makerere U., "you can see the impact" of the foundations' support, says an official. The changes include more female students and better library facilities.
One focus of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa was building science labs, like the one at Bayero U., in Nigeria.
One focus of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa was building science labs, like the one at Bayero U., in Nigeria.
Despite such issues, educators say the partnership helped spark discussions about the role higher education can play in the African continent's development and created a legacy that American universities interested in aiding Africa can build on.
The grant makers "were maintaining a visibility for African higher education at a time when it was necessary," says Tully Cornick, executive director of Higher Education for Development, which facilitates programs between American universities and higher-education institutions abroad. "They set the foundation for which many of our partnerships are being built on today."
In 2000, four of America's most venerable and wealthy grant makers—the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and Rockefeller Foundations—combined forces to revitalize what they saw as a neglected part of African society. For years African governments and the World Bank had focused on primary education, while higher education was left mostly to languish. But with democratic and economic reforms sweeping a number of countries on the continent in the 1990s, the foundations saw a rare opportunity to improve university work and promote higher education as a way to help shape the future of Africa.
Joined later by the William and Flora Hewlett, Andrew W. Mellon, and Kresge Foundations, the partners say they identified trends that cut across the continent.
"There were very few foundations working in Africa that worked Africa-wide. Carnegie was not everywhere. MacArthur was not everywhere. Rockefeller was not everywhere," says Omotade Akin Aina, Carnegie's program director for higher education and libraries in Africa. "The partnership kind of created a multiplier effect in terms of the leverage, in terms of the presence, in terms of the nature of the conversation."
Focused Investments
Recipients of the foundations' giving attest to that leverage.
The University of Cape Town and affiliated institutions received $35.6-million from partnership members from 2000 to 2010. While the money was crucial, there were broader benefits, says Jim McNamara, executive director for development and alumni at the South African university.
The foundations helped the University of Cape Town strengthen ties to universities in other parts of Africa, connections that had been broken or badly strained during the apartheid era, he says. For instance, Carnegie, Mellon, and Rockefeller have financed a program in which master's and doctoral students from outside South Africa go to Cape Town as part of their studies. The students return home once they finish their work, and their academic advisers at Cape Town visit the students' home countries.
"It helped to have that powerful a body with that sort of reputation saying, Look, Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, we think you should collaborate," says Mr. McNamara.
Venansius Baryamureeba, vice chancellor of Uganda's Makerere University, which received more than $42-million (including grants to academic and research networks based at the institution), says his institution benefited in a variety of ways, such as vastly improved library facilities, increased enrollment of female students, and better research capabilities.
"You can see the impact on the ground," he says. "It's visible."
To most African officials, the partnership's biggest accomplishment was expanding Internet access for African educators. In 2005 the foundations started to pay connectivity expenses for a group of universities and education associations, known as the Bandwidth Consortium, and helped negotiate a bulk deal with a satellite Internet-service provider to drastically cut costs.
At the time, spotty access to the Web was threatening to cut African scholars and students off from their peers in Asia, Europe, and North America, and was stifling their academic output, say African education officials.
The consortium "has opened doors for us and other institutions to enjoy reasonably good bandwidth at relatively low prices," says John Ssebuwufu, director of research and programs at the Association of African Universities.
Mr. Ssebuwufu says that some institutions left the consortium in recent years after finding better deals on their own, but that the foundation-backed project helped create a better marketplace.
For American universities, the partnership's accomplishments highlighted areas where they could engage with their African peers. Generally, foundation officials and education experts suggested three areas of opportunity: e-learning, faculty development, and administrative training.
With many Africans living in rural areas, the partnership tried to lay groundwork for the growth of distance learning and helped seven African universities explore how technology could be used to bolster teaching. Philanthropic funds paid for building multimedia classrooms; creating digital content for health sciences, engineering, and other fields; and using mobile phones and radios as educational tools.
Higher-education experts who have worked in Africa said American universities could help that nascent effort by sharing ideas on how they developed their own e-learning curricula in subjects that are universal.
"Math is math. It's not so much about local knowledge," says Anne-Claire Hervy, who helps oversee the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities' Africa program, which involves the U.S. Agency for International Development, HigherEducation for Development, and other organizations.
Compared with the foundations' financial contributions, the program is small, providing federal grants of around $1-million to facilitate links between universities in Africa and the United States, but there are areas of overlap.
As an example of an e-learningproject within the program, Ms. Hervy pointed to a new five-year effort by Ohio State University and Senegal's University of Gaston Berger to develop a degree program on sustainable agriculture. It is to be made available using distance-learning technologies for students in the Sahel, a grassy belt in North Africa where many farmers live.
Listening More
For faculty development, the foundations wanted to train a new generation of academics to help replace the large number of professors who are expected to retire in the coming years—a concern that several of the charitable funds plan to continue to work on even though the coalition has broken up. During the partnership, members focused on postgraduate training to increase the number of professors with Ph.D.'s and the retention of faculty members. For instance, at the University of Ibadan, in Nigeria, foundation money helped increase the percentage of faculty members with Ph.D.'s from 50 percent in 2001 to 63 percent in 2007.
One way American universities could help with the broader effort is by creating faculty exchanges, suggest foundation officials. Such exchanges, even short-term ones, can help keep new professors intellectually stimulated and less likely to leave academe, says Andrea Johnson, a program officer at Carnegie. On African campuses, she says, "it's very rare when you have that environment that contributes to a lively debate or discussion."
Ms. Hervy, of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, agrees that assistance is needed to help with the expected exodus of aging professors—"it's a huge concern"—and says that developing relationships between American and African scholars, and in some cases graduate and undergraduate students, is at the heart of the association's effort in Africa. For example, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Cape Town have received funds to start working together on ways to develop small, inexpensive solar-power cells—a project that will eventually include student exchanges between the institutions.
"Our partnerships already do build on the partnership's work in faculty development," she says, "and any U.S. universities wanting to engage can continue to help that work."
Foundation staff members stress that helping African institutions sometimes means supporting services and skills that American institutions may take for granted, such as administrative capabilities, financial management, and fund raising.
"Ordinarily, universities are more concerned about academic exchanges and programs. It would be helpful to extend this to other aspects of university life," says Kole A. Shettima, who directs the MacArthur Foundation's office in Abuja, Nigeria. MacArthur worked closely with four institutions in Nigeria and one in Madagascar to help them improve how they were managed and raise money, among other goals.
Mr. Cornick, of Higher Education for Development, echoes the need for better governance and management of African universities. The projects his organization is developing with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities focus on specific national and regional problems, like the spread of HIV/AIDS and the need for clean water, but will include training in "leadership skills" so that professors can start to assume more managerial roles at their institutions, he says.
Mr. Shettima emphasizes the need for strengthening African fund raising and alumni relations to help universities break out of their historical reliance on public funds. "Most of the universities are trapped in the former British tradition of dependence on government," he says.
In all, Mr. Shettima and other foundation officials offer a broad lesson based on their experiences: American universities should listen more to the needs of scholars in Africa and build on what African institutions are already doing.
While the foundations themselves struggled with the issue, some of the partnership's major accomplishments, like the Bandwidth Consortium, were achieved because it responded to what African university leaders said were priorities.
"We think U.S. universities should begin to think more carefully about the notion of partnership and engaging with African universities," says Mr. Akin Aina, of Carnegie. Too often partnerships are set up based on "the interest, the needs, the strengths, or some other dynamic that is essentially internal to the U.S. universities, rather than what comes from the African universities."
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