There are scarce but untapped resources in the higher education system in Africa that can be relatively quickly and efficiently brought to bear on critical social and economic problems, and in the process higher education can be made more relevant and of higher quality.Universities are communities of scholars. Those scholars have differing goals and objectives, and to the extent that there are goals of the university community as a whole they must be composite goals. People in Uganda, like people everywhere, want a good life for themselves and their families. The university community in Uganda, like such communities in other countries, aculturates its initiates into certain values, including professionalism and interest in certain kinds of knowledge and skills. From my contacts with members of the community, they often share an interest in the social and economic development of their nation.
I was impressed when Nakanyike Musisi, in a meeting two weeks ago, mentioned the evolution of ideas about universities in Uganda and developing nations in general. She suggested that in the Colonial period Makerere had specific goals and objectives that were linked to improving service and producing well trained people to serve the colonial government (under the direction of colonial authorities). In the early independence period, the goal was to create civil servants answerable to development goals of the newly independent nation. The 1960's saw a number of theorists, importantly from USAID's efforts to strengthen university capacity in developing nations, who discussed the "development university". This was a period in which bricks and mortar were important to building physical facilities, as were training a generation of new faculty, and providing technical assistance in the development of courses and curricula. I have been impressed however, that those theorists also emphasized the need to build linkages between institutions of higher education and government, funders, labor markets, and others. Practical hands on training and relevant skills development characterized the post crisis period in Uganda -- since the mid 1980's. Dr. Musisi sees the current university reforms seeking to combine all these goals as it learns from history.
Perhaps because I spent part of the summer looking at Kazakhstan's emergence from the Soviet system, I am also impressed by the impact of alternative models of education. I think Makerere University was originally heavily influenced by the British model, in which the university was seen as educating an elite. Perhaps with the involvement of the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and MacArthur Foundations, there has been a strong impact of U.S. models, in which education, service and knowledge generation are combined, with a more egalitarian and merit based approach.
I was trying to explain Uganda, from my admittedly limited perspective, to some friends and family. The period from say 1970 to 1986 -- the Crisis Period -- was terrible. Hundreds of thousand of people were killed. The per capita GDP was reduced by more than 40 percent. The infrastructure deteriorated. At the end of the period, Makerere University students sought shelter as revolutionary forces and government forces exchanged fire across the campus.
Since then, stability has been restored in the country, and conflict has been limited to border areas and cattle rustling rather than the wholesale violence with people everywhere afraid to leave their homes. Economic growth has been rapid and substantial, government services have expanded, and the infrastructure has been significantly restored. Ugandans are concerned about many remaining problems, but will think twice about disturbing the sources of recent progress.
Makerere University is the oldest institution of higher education in East Africa. I believe that in the post-colonial period it enjoyed a very high reputation for the excellence of its educational opportunities, and that the research its faculty did was of international importance. Still, it was also seen as serving only a small minority of students, inadequate to meet the nation's needs, and training them in an elitist fashion, not well suited to the growth of a new nation. I guess that the university barely survived the crisis. It has been challenged by the recovery period, as its enrollment exploded. Resources of all sorts have been strained. Still, it forms the keystone of Uganda's higher education system, and is playing a key role in educating students, creating knowledge, and providing services to the Ugandan nation.
The Innovations at Makerere Project (I@Mak) that I studied was successful in improving the capacity of the university to train agricultural extension workers, secondary teachers, engineers, health professionals, and civil servants to take roles in service provision in Uganda. Those skills are crucially important, and indeed have been the topic of this blog for years. I wonder, however, it there are not still more important functions for the university in Africa.
In that context, I have been wondering about the differences between the United States and Uganda, and which ones account for the differences in performance between the two countries. Of course, one is the depth of the human resource base. The education level in the United States is very high as that in Uganda is very low. But the United States worked pretty well as a nation before it achieved the current high standards of education.
Both nations have English as the national language. I live in a county in which one-third of the households speak another language at home, but there is a strong effort that everyone speaks English, and all the kids that go to school here seem to come out speaking English well. In contrast, I recall chatting with an American consultant in Kampala; she told me that concerned with the difficulties her Ugandan colleagues were having communicating in English, she suggested that the speak in their own language among themselves; she was informed that English was the only common language that they shared. English in the United States is established by the existence of a literature in the language and by the content popular culture. It is the main language of the media, of politics, and of the law and law enforcement.
There are strong institutions in the United States. For example, rule of law is strong. That means not only do the laws exist, and the police powers and courts to enforce them, but there is a wide spread cultural belief in the rule of law. While some people break the laws, most people believe that they should not do so. People believe that politicians and civil servants should serve the public, and that corruption in office is wrong. Trust based economic systems work reasonably well, because people are reasonably trustworthy. I fear that the cultural basis for many modern institutions are weak in Uganda.
Uganda is a tribal society, and it appears that often allegiance to tribe is more important than national identity. The United States is a multi-ethnic society, and while many hold dear a strong ethnic identity, few doubt that their allegiance to the nation trumps that to their ethnic group. German and Japanese Americans fought against Germany and Japan in World War II. Arab Americans are serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq.
Culture in the United States is modern, with an emphasis on beliefs based on science and evidence rather than on tradition. Superstitions exist, but superstitious people are less respected than the more modernly rational. People look to modern education systems for knowledge rather than to traditional authority figures. They look to modern health services rather than to traditional practitioners, to modern sources for economic and financial information rather than to sources of a more traditional nature.
I suspect that the higher education system in the United States has been for many decades a leading source of modern culture in all these senses. I suspect that Uganda and other African nations are going to have to modernize in many of these ways for nation building and social and economic development. I see few institutions other than those of higher education that can lead in that modernization.
I suggest that this modernizing mission of the university may be more important than just that of training the cadres of professional workers. That mission involves the generation of culture as well as knowledge. It involves the transmission of cultural values and attitudes as well as curation of collections of cultural artifacts. Universities would seem to be the place to prepare the curricula for the education system as a whole through which the culture may be modernized, as well as to prepare those who will utilize those curricula. It is a critical place to develop and promote the institutional innovations that will modernize the nation.
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