Preparing Africa S Graduates to Drive Economic Growth

Preparing Africa’s graduates to Drive Economic Growth

Preparing Africa’s graduates to Drive Economic Growth

Presentation to University Leaders’ Forum on the University Role In Harnessing ICT For Economic Development (November 18 – 21, 2006)

Neil Butcher

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

An Introductory Caveat

In preparing this paper, I have chosen to imagine an African university environment in which students will have ubiquitous access to broadband connectivity, as well as the devices required to connect to and use the Internet effectively. As will be seen, this has important implications for the way in which we approach the challenge of developing the ICT-savvy students mentioned in the introductory paragraph to this session. Many will argue that this is foolish, as it does not take account of on-the-ground realities in African universities. However, my view is that it is essential to construct a vision of Africa’s future that is not bound by current constraints, but rather that imagines anything to be possible, as visions bound by constraints are at least part of the reason why we find ourselves in our present situation in Africa. Importantly, I contend that rapid development of ICT as a social phenomenon in the 21st Century – and particularly growth of Web 2.0 platforms[1] – is predominantly driven by assumptions that participants (not users) are able to be online, in a broadband environment, 24 hours a day. If African higher education students cannot be, then it follows that they can not become truly ICT-savvy. Thus, we need to establish strong political, commercial, and civil commitment to ensuring that we achieve this goal, a commitment which is not strong enough currently across the continent.

Shifting the Focus

The focus of Part 1 of Session 5 is on what skills sets are needed by African and global employers, and what this means for the kinds of graduates our continent’s higher education institutions should be producing. However, in the context of the overall focus of this University Leaders’ Forum, I found this brief problematic given the overall focus of the Forum on harnessing ICT for economic development, for various reasons:

1. The processes of curriculum transformation in universities are such that providing short-term predictions on the skills needed by employers is of marginal value, as it is likely that those needs will have changed by the time curricula can be transformed to respond to these needs. Thus, this kind of demand-driven planning can be potentially enormously disruptive without making any meaningful contribution to economic development.
2. It seems clear that the key to economic development of Africa lies not in servicing the needs of current employers, whose business models have demonstrated limited – if any – meaningful ability to drive sustained economic growth across the continent, but rather in producing those economic, political, and intellectual leaders who will create new opportunities and businesses that enable African economies to find their niche and compete effectively in the global economy.
3. The focus of universities lies in shaping the intellectual direction of countries by creating and sharing knowledge, not in producing future employees at lower levels. Thus, there is no logic in transforming universities into glorified Technical and Vocational Colleges. This demands a different approach to understanding the relationship between higher education and economic development. Such an assumes particular importance in Africa, because most countries on the continent have not yet carved out economic niches for themselves that will differentiate us as a continent from other parts of the world and enable us to occupy a meaningful and equal place at the global economic table. Thus, the role of universities in producing ICT-savvy economic, political, and intellectual leaders who will define and create this place is an urgent priority.

Given these points, I have chosen to try to consider what implications the demand for economic development across the continent has for one of the key outputs of university systems – their graduates. I intend to bring together various disparate arguments to demonstrate that it is critical now for African universities to radically re-think what the purpose of the curricula is, all the while linking this to the challenges that have been placed before us by the global social phenomenon that is Information and Communication Technology.

The Disconnect Between Public Spending and Economic Development

In his preparatory paper to this Forum, Dick Ng’ambi argued that:

The challenge in Africa is that investments in [Higher Education Institutions] without corresponding improvement in the economies of the countries have led to massive and faster brain drain of…graduates.[2]

However, it is important to place this problem in the context of a broader challenge that exists in public welfare systems in poor countries. In a speech to the TED Conference in 2005, Iqbal Quadir – the founder of Grameen Phone in Bangladesh (a company driven by local villagers that turns over multi-million dollar profits in apparently impossible circumstances) – made the following telling comments about the disconnect between public spending and economic development:

Rich countries have been sending aid to poor countries for the last 60 years. By and large, this has failed. The question is, why is that? In my mind, there is something to learn from the history of Europe. There is a lot of struggle that has gone on in Europe, where citizens are empowered by technologies and they demanded that authorities come down from their high horses. In the end, there is better bargaining between the authorities and citizens and democracies, capitalism and everything else flourished…Aid actually did the opposite. It empowered authorities, and, as a result, marginalized citizens. The authorities did not have the reason to make economic growth happen so that they could tax people and make more money to run their business, because they were getting it from abroad. And, in fact, if you see oil-rich countries where citizens are not yet empowered, the same thing goes…because the aid or oil or mineral money acts the same way. It empowers authorities without activating the citizens, their hands, legs, brains, what have you. And, if you agree with that, then I think the best way to improve these countries is to recognize that economic development is of the people, by the people, for the people. And that is the real network effect.[3]

Above all, then, the key challenge is to find ways to re-establish this connection between public government spending and economic development, ensuring that the former is driven primarily by a demand to ensure that economic development will secure future taxes to sustain the public spending. Public African universities need also to face up to this challenge, and focus their attention on producing people who can drive economic development that is ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. But, given the introductory comments I have made, the immediate priority is to produce the next generation of African leaders, people who will be based in and committed to Africa and her development, who have the necessary competence to engage as equals in the global economic market place, and who have the competence and creativity to imagine and create new, sustainable economic futures for African countries.

If we understand this as a necessary pre-cursor to sustainable, large-scale economic development, this places a unique responsibility on universities around the continent to consider whether or not current programmes and curricula are likely to produce such leaders.

The Skills Required of Economic Leaders

In a fascinating review of How Computerized Work and Globalization Shape Human Skill Demands[4], American professors Frank Levy and Richard Murnane explore how growing use of ICT is changing the American workforce by automating certain tasks and facilitating the offshoring of others. Amongst other topics, the document focuses on distinguishing between problems that have rules-based solutions, which can therefore be computerized and automated, and those that do not and therefore require human creativity to be solved. Importantly, it also concludes that a key emerging competence is the ability to identify appropriate rules-based solutions (or combination of solutions) to apply to specific problems, again a uniquely human competence.

In conducting this review, the paper concludes that education systems need to place increased emphasis on key basic and advanced skills if they are to produce skilled people to meet changing economic demands. As I believe that this neatly summarizes some of the key competences that will be required of Africa’s future economic leaders, excerpts are quoted at some length below:

Basic Skills

The ability to read becomes particularly important in economic disequilibria when people must process new information to learn new routines. In these disequilibria, society relies on text to disseminate information rapidly. As computer technology and increased global competition accelerate the rate of economic change…the need for reading has increased correspondingly.

The faster pace of change has also increased demands for writing. For example, a growing number of firms ask employees to document solutions to new problems so the solutions can be disseminated throughout the organization. The documentation can only be effective if it can be clearly understood. The reliance on email to exchange information rapidly similarly requires the ability to write clearly and persuasively.

Because of computerization, the use of abstract models now permeates many jobs and has turned many people into mathematics consumers…in most cases, a computerized tool does the actual calculation, but using the model without understanding the math leaves one vulnerable to potentially serious misjudgments.

Teaching Advanced Skills

Begin with Expert Thinking – the ability to solve problems that, unlike algebra, lack explicit rules-based solutions. These problems must be solved through some form of pattern recognition. Rules-based solutions must still be part of a curriculum – i.e. students still need to know subjects like algebra. But a curriculum must recognize that a rules-based solution is usually the second part of a two-part problem solving process. The first part of the process – the part that retains labor market value - is the ability to recognize which rules-based solution applies in a particular case…Understanding consists of seeing a pattern. Learning this kind of pattern recognition takes practice. In particular, it requires going beyond traditional assignments where a student knows that the problems at the end of a chapter on long division can all be solved using long division – no need to think about which rules apply. In subjects like history or literature, the equivalent of rules-based solutions is a focus on narrow facts – e.g. dates and names and little more. In this case, going beyond rules-based solutions means teaching the underlying relationships among narrow facts.

The skill of Complex Communication – making effective oral and written arguments, eliciting information from others – can similarly be taught using existing subject matter. But teaching this skill requires both a change in emphasis and additional time - the time needed to review and grade oral presentations and frequent student essays.

Perhaps the biggest potential obstacle to increasing students’ mastery of Expert Thinking and Complex Communication are…tests (assessments) that emphasize recall of facts rather than these critical skills.[5]

The Importance of Creativity

Linked to the above, however, is another key attribute, urgently required but not often actively fostered in education system: creativity. Above all else, the solution to Africa’s economic problems will lie in creative thinking. Without this, we will never define appropriate niche roles for African economies, or develop the innovative solutions that the scale of our developmental problems demand. On the one hand, this is a blessing. Other than Africa’s abundance of raw materials – which, as Iqbal Quadir has noted, has tended to impede rather than support development – the continent’s only meaningful untapped resource is its people. And yet Afro-pessimism has conned us all into believing that this resource will never be tapped, despite the obviously abundant richness of creativity running through the veins of all African societies. The fundamental problem is that we do not yet see, or have not defined, meaningful social or economic value in the kinds of creativity that permeate African societies. And education systems unfortunately tend to exacerbate the problem. As Sir Ken Robinson, senior advisor to the J. Paul Getty Trust, notes:

Being wrong is not the same as being creative. However, what we do know is that, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they come to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. And the result is that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities…If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized.[6]

His contention is that this problem with public education systems has largely to do with how they were shaped to meet the needs of industrial societies, needs that no longer exist as ICT and the information economies it is spawning create changing demands of human endeavour. This problem has peculiar connotations in African contexts, as such systems were imposed on African societies through colonialism, but without the widespread industrial development that justified their existence. Paradoxically, many of these systems continue to exist, largely without any meaningful adjustment to their context of operation.