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Nine Problems That Hinder Partnerships in Africa

African higher education faces a crisis. The quality of university teaching and research has declined drastically as institutions across the continent contend with budget cuts, growing enrollments, repeated strikes, a crumbling infrastructure, and a migration of the most talented professors to developed countries.
In response, universities from America and Europe, government aid agencies, and charitable foundations have started major efforts to help rebuild higher education in Africa. While those projects have dedicated substantial funds and human resources to the cause, they so far have produced mixed results. The problem is that representatives of universities from developed countries and other well-intentioned people come to Africa with basic assumptions that undermine their work.
Those assumptions about how to assist the region are not always explicit. They are manifested in subtle ways in the behavior and speech of higher-education officials who come to Africa. What's more, the officials often fail to examine their own assumptions, some of which are obviously unrealistic. To be sure, not all Europeans and North Americans make such mistakes. But as the former and current directors of the Office of International Education and Partnerships at the University of Botswana, over the past four years we have seen such assumptions ruin potentially promising endeavors.
While many factors lead to the failure of partnerships, we have identified nine problems that hinder outside aid to Africa's universities and several ways to improve the interaction between African academics and their peers:
1. Academics from developed countries often take the lead in research, while African colleagues are relegated to minor roles. A recent example occurred when an American scholar came to Botswana with a grant from a prestigious international organization to study aspects of condom use as part of an HIV/AIDS research project. The researcher approached the University of Botswana saying she needed a graduate student from her discipline to conduct the field research. She would pay the student well and allow the student to use the data for a thesis. From her viewpoint, the proposal sounded like a good deal.
But our university's faculty members had two issues with her approach. First, they had not been involved in the development of the problem, the hypothesis, or the methodology. (The researcher had been in Botswana when she was developing the project but had made little attempt to contact the university.) Second, she was proposing to employ a graduate student whom the Botswanan academics would prefer to have working on their research. Ultimately the Botswana faculty members gave their American counterpart the cold shoulder, leaving her most puzzled that her "generous" offer had not been taken up.
2. Outside scholars think they know what curriculum is best for universities in the developing world. Consider a recent situation involving a graduate program in Italy. The program was an interdisciplinary master's degree in community development to help Central European universities educate civil servants to work with local governments that are making the transition to a post-communist society. Several institutions offered the degree jointly. Italian academics proposed starting the same cooperative program, with virtually the same syllabus, in conjunction with four southern-African universities.