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GUNI’s Universities and Social Commitment Observatory: Focus on Africa
This article outlines some successful experiences that are being developed in the African context and identified by GUNI’s Universities and Social Commitment Observatory.
Following the line of the World Conference on Higher Education with its special session on Africa, GUNI wishes to highlight the good practices from the African region identified by its Universities and Social Commitment Observatory. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), for instance, drawing on experience gained from previous programmes of working with universities in Africa, is supporting a partnership program to mainstream environment and sustainability concerns into the teaching, research, community engagement and management of universities in Africa. This programme, called MESA (Mainstreaming Environment & Sustainability into African) Universities Partnership[i], includes an Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Innovations short course developed and implemented by partners (to strengthen capacity to establish ESD innovations in universities); Pilot programmes linking universities, communities, business and industry in sustainable development partnerships, etc.
Many universities in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region participate in a network of institutions aiming to include sustainable development aspects in their curricula. The experience “SADC Regional Environmental Education Programme (REEP)” supports Environmental Education (EE) processes through enabling decentralised networking of EE practitioners within the SADC region. An important dimension of this networking has been the formation of partnerships with existing regional initiatives such as the IUCN Regional Office Southern Africa (ROSA) and the Rhodes University Environmental Education Unit.
Another important experience is the Regional Centres of Expertise (RCEs) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) promoted by the United Nations University. An RCE is a network of existing formal, non-formal and informal education organizations, mobilized to deliver ESD to a regional community. A network of RCEs worldwide will constitute the Global Learning Space for Sustainable Development. RCEs aspire to achieve the goals of the UN Decade of ESD, by translating its global objectives into the context of the local community in which they operate. As of April 2008, there were fifty-five RCEs globally –many of them are based in local universities, of which ten are in Africa: Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Swaziland and Uganda.
Another example that develops its curricula focused on ESD is the University for Development Studies (UDS), Ghana. It was established in 1992 by the Government of Ghana to “blend the academic world with the community in order to provide constructive interaction between the two for the total development of northern Ghana, in particular, and the country as a whole”. UDS works to integrate concepts such as sustainability, community engagement, development, and poverty alleviation strategies transversally in all university. In terms of problem-oriented curriculum developing, UDS has created ‘a pro-poor community-based university’.
Most of the implications of science and research with regard to sustainable development can be grouped under one or more of these three aspects: ethical, environmental and social.
In this sense, in Madagascar, the University of Fianarantsoa (UF) - Biodiversity conservation trough bioprospecting project is worth noting at this point. Its function to explore of the medicinal plants in a Coastal National Reserve called Manombo was initiated in 2007. It focuses on antimalaria and anti HIV/AIDS phytochemical compounds from the reserve plants, plant-derived chemical compounds with potential health-promoting properties. It also intends to contribute to vegetation conservation and to the general improvement of the well-being of the people living in the area.
Another experience to consider is the Sub Saharan Africa Participatory Research Network – REPAS. It aims to promote participatory research or community based research in the African Region. It brings together community members, decision makers and researchers, in a reflection-action process that help them better understand basic community problems and therefore, provoke the desired changes and create new knowledge. It often collaborates with research institutes, such as the West African Research Centre and has representatives in Mauritania, Gambia, Mali, Guinea and Togo.
The University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, has been developing some successful experiences such as: AIDS and health care modelling in the Centre for Actuarial Research. The Centre is a research and teaching unit. The primary focus of the work involves maintaining and developing a model that projects the demographic impact of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. As for the environmental issue, the UCT is developing the Green Campus Initiative (GCI). It was started by a handful of students and staff to address issues of sustainability on UCT campus. This volunteer-run organization's numbers have now increased to over 500 members and its influence has extended to several key projects that seek to make UCT carbon-neutral. These and other UCT programmes, such as The Children’s Institute and the Industrial Health Research Unit, engage with issues of sustainability, economic growth, health related challenges, urban and regional development, human rights, justice, social reconstruction and identity, political empowerment, and employment creation.
In addition, the UNESCO/Hewlett-Packard project to Reverse Brain Drain to Brain Gain in Africa aims to help reduce brain drain by providing grid computing technology to universities in Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe. Technology represents a powerful tool in facilitating brain gain or brain circulation. It has the potential to help create environments for the sharing and exchange of knowledge among scientists who remain in their home country and those in the Diaspora. But more importantly the access to joint research and developing collaboration could prove to be a strong incentive for experts to continue to work in their home country.
On the other hand, the Knowledge, Technology and Society (KNOTS) team at the Institute of Development Studies from the University of Sussex (Brighton, UK) focuses on such pressing practical and policy questions in health, environment and science. Some of the KNOTS Team programmes are: Vaccination in West Africa; Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern Africa: Natural Resources, Governance and Policy Processes, and so on.
An important project worth considering comes from Rwanda, from a context of the post-civil war time. In order to address some of the needs of this particular time, the Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management (KIST), the country's first publicly owned technological institute, was set up in 1997. The Institute is responsible for identifying social needs and problems to which it gives solutions through its various areas of knowledge. For instance, the experience of Technology Transfer to the Community - development of biogas and waste management plants for penitentiary institutions.
THETA is a Ugandan NGO initiated through a partnership between The AIDS Support Organization (TASO), Uganda Ltd and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in Kampala, Uganda. The success of this project was then transformed into an organization working with Traditional healers in HIV/AIDS and with some courses and projects with: Makerere University school of Public Health, University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, and University of Kwazulu Natal. Their areas of work cover education, counselling and improved patient care. THETA is indeed a mutually respectful collaboration between Traditional Healers (TH) and Biomedical Health Practitioners (BHP) in the fight against AIDS and other diseases.
In the area of gender, it is worth highlighting The Institute of Women, Gender and Development Studies (IWGDS), part of the Ahfad University for Women, in Sudan. For more than two decades since 1986 IWGDS has worked with women and men from throughout Sudan and around the world to help emancipate Sudanese women through education, extension, intervention and advocacy.
Finally, other example of successful good practice that links university with civil society is The Abul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). It was started in 2003 by three economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. J-PAL seeks to substantively improve the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people by providing the development community – including international organizations, national and local governments, and development-focused NGOs – with concrete, scientifically-tested information about which poverty alleviation strategies have real and substantive impacts on the lives of the poor. One of its projects is the Africa Program for Education Impact Evaluation (APEIE). In June 2008, J-PAL launched the APEIE in Abuja, Nigeria with the objective of improving the ability of countries in the region to meet the Millennium Development Goals in education. The APEIE program is designed to strengthen and support the education sector’s plans in the Education For All Fast Track Initiative.
Even though the examples of good practice mentioned illustrate different forms of social commitment they all reflect a strong interest on the part of the academics involved to determine HEIs activities in relation to the needs of the African continent. Some of the experiences highlight institutional models that are based on ethical criteria, community ties or a reformulation of the knowledge generation. African HEIs have made some real positive strides in the area of sustainability education and in many cases is an example to the rest of the world.
However, HEIs need to develop an integrated institutional policy framework for sustainability and human and social development; integrating the concept of sustainability transversally into their institutions as well as with a transdisciplinary approach. Changes in these and other areas need to be taken into account in working out long-term strategies for development.
This article is based on a paper presented by the coordinator of the Observatory, Valtencir Maldonado, during the 12th General Conference Association of African Universities held in May in Abuja, Nigeria. The full paper can be downloaded in English and in French.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
