News South Asia

 A ground-breaking Africa owned and driven collaboration, the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), was launched Tuesday at a key higher education summit in Senegal. The launch was attended by the AU Chairperson, Dr Dlamini-Zuma, and politicians, stakeholders and professors from Africa’s higher education sector. 

 

Bringing together 14 university institutions from around the continent, ARUA aims to unite their distinctive fields of expertise, in order to achieve complementary and co-ordinated programmes of research and training. 

 

Professor Adam Habib, the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, who sits on the executive committee of the Alliance, said ARUA was conceived out of a statement Chairperson Zuma made a couple of years ago when she “expressed the urgent need for Africa to develop a network of universities that allowed for the development of intellectual skills. Ones that would catapult Africa to the cutting edge of research on global challenges.” Habib said that “clearly there is an urgent need for Africa to develop it’s own intelligence, research base and students [and that] if we don’t do this, [Africa] will never be free”. 

 

So when Zuma made that point, Habib and a few others decided to act on conversations that they had in the past, “we decided we need to pull together and start discussing the possibilities,” he said. 

 

 

Africa’s universities have in recent decades shouldered massive increases in enrolments but without commensurate levels of growth in public funding. The consequence of this includes the fact that research from sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag behind both developed and developing regions elsewhere on the globe.

 

Chairperson Zuma said that “the initiative forms a critical part of the conversation that the continent must have towards it’s future, especially around higher education and research.” That the formation of an alliance addresses the key issues of the need for higher education institutions to cooperate and integrate, which will in turn “help us provide the answers on, for example, how to modernise and transform agriculture, the development of the most effective transportation systems to connect our urban centres, to build responsive health centres and prevent devastating outbreaks - like the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa - and how to protect and develop Africa’s biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.”