We have been present at this particular university since 2007 when we started an ENRECA (ENhancing REsearch CApacity) project with a cross disciplinary research consisting of researchers from KU, AU and SDU. Luckily we managed to obtain funding for a further 5 years in 2013 from DFC, now for two separate projects: one in health and one in land and trust issues.

I have been conducting these masters and PhD courses 7 times now and each course was ended by a new invention: “speed supervision” where we gave each student 30 minutes supervision on their individual concept paper or study issues. A uniform picture of the reality at African universities is beginning to emerge from these speed supervision sessions and the dialogues during the courses. I find them interesting in the light of the present developments in the Building Stronger Universities (BSU) plan and the decision to skip the planned phase 2 and replace it by a weak and inappropriate south driven approach. I would like to share with you, minister, just how far away from reality the BSU plan has moved with this decision. And I would like to suggest a cheap and simple solution to bring back BSU to reality and to the needs of universities and students in Africa.

Let me start with four illustrative cases:

Case A.

A young medical student asked the obvious research question his senior colleagues had overlooked: how many pregnant women contract HIV after their first negative HIV test during pregnancy? He managed to persuade the ENRECA project to fund his research. He carried out the study without help and found that 2 out of 100 pregnant women contracted HIV and suggested that pregnant women be tested for HIV at least twice during pregnancy. We urged him to write an abstract for the most prestigious international HIV congress and his abstract was accepted. At the same time he starting working in an obstetric department and the hospital management immediately made him head of department with a heavy workload and responsibility. Neither the hospital nor his university would help him obtain a passport or a visa for his travel abroad and there was no available funding for his travel expenses. Disappointed, he then chose to leave both university and hospital to work for an international humanitarian organization in a neighboring country.

CASE B.

A master student of business and management had finished and defended his master thesis with supervision by seniors from two different universities. When he wanted to publish part of his thesis as a scientific paper he was met by silence from his supervisors. We advised him to contact them in person, which he did, and he was told by one of the supervisors that his function as supervisor was over and any further assistance would require a payment. The student was unable to write the paper without the assistance of his supervisors as they were co-authors and the student had never written a paper for a journal before. The paper was never written.

CASE C.

A master student brought a concept paper for speed supervision that addressed a clear research question: do female students feel more stressed during exams than male students? However, his concept paper had been turned down by the ethical committee at his university with a simple conclusion: this is not research. He failed to get a more detailed explanation from the committee. He later learned that the head of the committee had wanted some sort of payment for an approval. His supervisor was not particularly helpful and the student subsequently gave up his efforts to obtain a master’s degree.

CASE D.

A senior employee at a university administration office presented a well-developed concept paper on retention of human capital at universities in Northern Uganda. He had worked on it for several years without finding suitable supervisors or interest in funding his PhD. The observations he had made prior to his proposal were plenty and quite clear:

1. Most teachers at universities were at masters or candidate level while very very few had a PhD.
2. Most master programmes were either non-functional or non-existing in reality.
3. A number of masters programmes had failed to seek and obtain national accreditation from the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) and were in essence illegal. The general lack of resources in the academic departments in the faculties have engendered very low morale and negative attitudes on the part of the heads of department, hindering the review of academic programmes, and threatening the closure or shelving of programmes whose lapse of time is clicking the mandatory cycle acceptable by NCHE. Some private universities had been shut down for the same reason but no public universities had yet been asked to close down their non-accredited master programmes. The probable reason, the student indicated, was that most members of the NCHE were vice chancellors of public universities.
4. Master students most often pay for their master programme themselves out of their own pocket and universities see the tuition fees as a welcome income generation.
5. Most PhD’s leave their university shortly after they obtained the degree because of lack of career opportunities, heavy teaching loads, low pay and no funding of research.
6. Finally, the student behind the proposal had observed that the institutional brain was lost and system memory impaired because management colleagues don’t share knowledge and because deans and vice-chancellors leaving their position take everything with them, including knowledge, history and experience, leaving a completely blank desk, and institution,  to the successor. In accordance with the provisions of the law of Uganda, faculty deans and institute directors in Uganda’s public universities are elected after every four to five years or so.

 

Ghost masters

When we started the former ENRECA project at the university in Northern Uganda we were given the impression by university management that the university had over 15 Masters programmes running or planned. When it came to reality only one was near functional programme and two were more or less at a conceptual development stage with no actual content. There were no PhD schools.

Stunned students

During the speed supervision sessions we have had over the years at this particular university we have listened to the reports of over 150 PhD and master students. The majority have been working on their concept papers for more than 3 years, some for over 5 years, without relevant supervision or even basic guidance as to relevance and methodology. Students lament lack of clear administrative procedures, lack of knowledgeable seniors, lack of supervisors, lack of transparency in the academic processes and failure to maintain steady contact with supervisors during their PhD/Master studies.

Most students only had internet if they paid for it themselves and only through the mobile EDGE/3G telephone net. Surprisingly few students had received practical training in basic research skills like conceptual development, literature search, data handling, ethics or basic methodology. Students from larger universities also complained that they were “kept” in their position as PhDs for far longer than necessary because having PhDs was a source for supervisors to obtain extra funding and the students were forced to take over the supervisors teaching obligations at university for years. Some students were either lost in administrative or bureaucratic delays or missing documents while other students were told that they should collect more data.

BSU phase 2

With the proposed structure for BSU phase 2 DANIDA has decided that universities in Africa are capable of formulating research projects, developing curricula and they have fully functional university administration with transparent routine procedures for obtaining a master or PhD degree. DANIDA also seems to imagine that lecturers all have a PhD degree and that the programmes for obtaining masters and PhD degrees are functional and accredited according to national guidelines and international standards.

Why and how DANIDA has managed to create this picture of current state of affairs at universities in Africa is a mystery. I still receive emails from desperate PhD students at various universities in Ghana enrolled and funder under the BSU phase 1 project. They have failed to get local support for supervision and they have not been guided in making research relations with research teams at Danish Universities. Their funding will be withdrawn without a Danish partner so now they are forced to send desperate emails to Danish universities.

BSU

DANIDA has with the plans for the next BSU phase decided to move directly from basic research and administrative capacity building to research funding at (selected) universities in (selected) African countries.

There are no indications that universities in Africa have suddenly developed a fully functional masters and PhD environment nor have they yet got the administrative set-up or human teaching capital required to carry out independent research. Universities in Africa lack much more than money – they lack human capital, curricula and long term collaborative research capacity building programmes where senior lecturers from the North assist in lifting the huge teaching obligations while the young researcher obtain their masters and PhDs. That was what the former ENRECA programme did: trained researchers and university teachers. The ENRECA programme was praised in the HERA report for its construction and achievements, yet, for no sensible reason,  it was discarded by DANIDA and replaced by the current BSU programme that has failed completely in lifting the heir from the ENRECA era.

Furthermore DANIDA has decided to stop a phase 2 of BSU focusing on the administrative capacity building of universities and, for no obvious reason, suddenly assume the administrative capacity is in place. Furthermore, we have just learnt that the excellent idea with administrative PhDs has been dropped at the same time. Thereby the student in case C will never be able to fund his PhD that could actually have produced an evidence base for decisions on where to put our donor money in university settings. DANIDA has effectively put an end to South based relevant research supported by researchers from the North.

The new BSU project is termed phase 2, but as a Danish filmmaker once said when he wanted to make a follow up movie to his first movie success: we named the movie as number three, skipping the obvious no. 2 because no. 2 movies are always a failure, as he said. As it turned out the “third” movie was a complete failure.

Professional stunting

DANIDA has, once again, changed their policy for research development and as a senior University management person told us: they have changed their plans so often that we can no longer trust that their intentions are to support capacity building at our university. We are probably better off without their false promises, he concluded.

In Uganda, the state of university education went up from the point where there was only one university in 1987 with just about 10,000 students to a point where there were 28 universities with over 65,000 students by 2008 (ibid.). By 2011, the number of universities had reached 32, with an enrolment of 140,096 students. Nobody has tried to plan for the explosion in need of associate professors with PhDs to teach and supervise.

Research is not underwear you change every day, picking a color of your liking. By changing strategy once a year DANIDA is contributing to, maybe even speeding up, a rapid professional stunting at African universities. Building stronger universities is not about building because the BSU 2 is based on the assumption that there is a foundation to construct a building on. The capacity to engage in research collaboration the way that BSU 2 requires is not present in African universities. The South based DANIDA funded projects in Tanzania and Vietnam have proven this.  There is no foundation for the BSU 2 building and the BSU 2 model will bomb universities and students 25 years back to the time before ENRECA programmes. African universities are threatened by a huge gap in the human teaching capital that will initiate a process of professional stunting – they don’t need charity or short lived research funds with a new focus every year. African universities need close research collaboration and administrative capacity building in a long term commitment before they are forced to jump into the “free research market”, that the BSU 2 represents.

I strongly suggest that DANIDA takes a time out, and behaves as a responsible global donor seeking maximum evidence and impact. DANIDA should use the time out to consult the Danish research teams that have actually had decades of collaborative research and teaching with African universities and research groups. The present “quick and dirty” consultation with south partners is not sufficient and does not include all stakeholders. It is recommended that DANIDA seriously considers to re-introduce the excellent and popular ENRECA model where everybody was working according to a long term transparent plan both in Denmark and at African partner institutions. Now, that is building stronger universities and even on a foundation of solid, sound evidence.