African universities must transform higher education. At stake is the future of the African continent and humanity itself, as much of this humanity becomes increasingly African.
The coronavirus has laid bare the government’s failings in the education sector over the last 60 years. Even now, faced with the challenges brought by COVID-19, it has opted to place the responsibility of ensuring that students can safely return to school squarely in the hands of school managements.
If we divorce training for the workplace from university education, universities can return to being sites of knowledge that are open to the public and that benefit society.
Unable to exploit the internet like their more fortunate peers, poor students in Kenya’s rural areas are losing more of what little chance they have to succeed in an education system that already does not favour them.
Education is a critical pillar of humanity. It seems the pandemic is what we needed for us to realise that we need a proper education system. Already, every problem in the way the media, the church, and the government are handling the pandemic is fundamentally a thinking and education problem. A conversation between Dr.Wandia Njoya and Joe Kobuthi on the current state of the Kenyan Education system and the future of it.
The financing of higher education is becoming an issue of grave concern to policymakers. How can universities provide high-quality education and student support in an era of tight or declining resources? What changes are required to adapt to the disruptions caused by the digitised economy?
The quality of education in African universities has been steadily declining in the face of financial instability. This is having an impact on the employment prospects of graduates.
The current Universities Act negates the struggles that led us to the constitution which the Kenyan people promulgated after decades of struggle, blood, sweat and tears. And worse, it reifies the painful legacy of slavery that still haunts Africa and her descendants in the world’s most powerful country.
On the second week of January 2019, Form 1 students reported to their various secondary schools. From news reports, a number arrived in high spirits, jovial and excited to be living their dream. But the faces of many more betrayed them – the students seemed tense and glum, their parents deflated and even angry. Many […]
The Deputy President’s words will worry Kenyan citizens who have no exit option out of a poorly thought-out turn in education policy. By AKOKO AKECH
I was once suspended for inciting a strike. Or at least that is what the letter said. It was the March of my second year in high school; in my first, we had gone on strike twice. The first was a peaceful act of protest that begun at the assembly ground on a cold Monday […]
In my last feature, I wrote on the six capacity challenges facing African universities: institutional supply, resources, faculty, research, outputs, and leadership. In this essay, I focus on one critical aspect of the outputs of our universities, namely, the employability of our graduates. To be sure, universities do not exist simply for economic reasons, for return […]
Over the past two decades African higher education has undergone profound changes. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities on the continent were few in number, small in scale, and elitist institutions with the limited mandate of producing cadres for the Africanization or indigenization of the newly independent state apparatuses. In the 1980s and 1990s, during […]
In early 2005, I went to see Geoffrey Griffin, the director of Starehe Boys Centre, just before he died in June of that same year. We discussed many things, among them the 8-4-4 education system. “The fact of the matter is that there is intrinsically nothing wrong with the 8-4-4 system,” Griffin told me then. […]
The Elephant in conversation with Dr. Wandia Njoya, a blogger and lecturer.
In my country Kenya, being a ‘youth’ officially ends on attaining 35 years. Once one gets to this age, you are no longer eligible to benefit from the ‘affirmative action’ policies and laws put in place to ‘uplift’ young people as a disadvantaged demographic. Mid this year (2018), I shall be officially departing from this […]
I attended a private high school, Girls’ College, in my teens. It is situated in the leafy suburb of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. We received what was deemed “the best education”, which is to say, distinctly British. We had etiquette lessons in form one, at age thirteen, where we were taught how to talk, how to walk, […]
