Written evidence submitted by the Association of Commonwealth Universities and The British Academy

 

 

Introduction

 

1. This submission argues that higher education (HE) and research are essential to Nigeria's national and federal development. The importance of robust HE systems in Africa is firmly acknowledged by DFID's own briefing paper on the subject.[1] Through teaching and research, universities develop the people and the knowledge needed to tackle the many complex and inter-related problems which underpin all aspects of development. This includes the social and cultural as much as it does the technical and scientific, areas of particular salience in Nigeria's federal system.

 

2. HE trains the highly skilled workers which modern knowledge-based economies depend on, and which the institutions of government, law and the public sector require if they are to run effectively and efficiently. Research enables new technologies to be developed, or existing technologies to be adapted, helping to drive and sustain growth. Universities also act as hubs which connect the latest knowledge and expertise with the people and communities who need it most; from making available the latest scientific advances in health or agriculture, to developing bespoke solutions to local problems. Across a range of disciplines, university research generates the knowledge and solutions which are needed to support effective governance, planning and policy-making at a variety of levels.[2]

 

3. UK development work also stands to benefit from a well supported and responsive Nigerian research sector. Good research, produced in Nigeria, and embedded within the social, culture and political contexts in which development funding is to be invested, will ensure that UK money is well targeted, and that programme design is informed by a fuller and more nuanced reading of national needs and the challenges to meeting these.

 

4. Both the British Academy and The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) are active in promoting and supporting research in African universities, and in supporting research collaboration between researchers and institutions in the UK and Africa. The ACU works extensively with its 95 African Commonwealth members (including 32 in Nigeria), while the Academy operates a number of funding schemes which assist African scholars to undertake research in the UK, and enable collaborative research between African and UK scholars.

 

5. The two organisations have collaborated extensively in the past two years as part of an exercise designed to identify workable solutions to some of the challenges facing African researchers, and the potential role of the UK academic and funding community in addressing these. With more universities than any other African country, Nigeria has been a particular focus of this work. The results of this initiative are presented in the enclosed publication, The Nairobi Report: Frameworks for Africa-UK Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

 

6. The state of HE in Nigeria has seriously deteriorated over the past twenty years. With its own substantial reserves Nigeria should be in a position to make significant investments in the public university system from its own resources. Indeed the government has recently committed to channelling more funding to research and plans to spend some $223 million on refurbishing six federal universities. However, considerable investment will still be needed to revitalise struggling institutions and there is an important role for the international donor community to play in encouraging and supporting both the federal and state governments as they seek to find ways to achieve this.

 

7. With modern HE and research systems now depending more and more on international collaboration, donors such as DFID can help by supporting Nigerian universities to enhance their participation in international networks, ensuring that their research is of high quality and while addressing local needs is still connected to global scientific debates. Given DFID's substantial commitments to development research over the coming years, we believe that this is an agenda with which DFID could productively deepen its engagement in Nigeria. Structures and networks to support international and regional research links already exist in some areas, including in Nigeria the recently established West African Research Management Association.[3] Such interventions often have a disproportionately catalytic effect by helping universities to access internationally available resources, and thereby ensuring long term stability.

 

DFID and higher education in Nigeria

 

8. We fully support DFID's important educational work in Nigeria, on primary and girls' education in particular, but believe that the Committee should also take into account the relevance of HE and research, and DFID's potential contributions to these, when considering the various issues which are framed in this inquiry. DFID has already acknowledged the importance of HE in a number of ways. Its 2006 paper, The importance of secondary, vocational and higher education to development, argues that 'investment is also needed in secondary, tertiary and vocational education, lifelong learning and skills, in order to increase the ability of governments and the private sector, to deliver basic services, and to promote sustainable growth'. A further briefing paper on HE, commissioned from the ACU, outlines some of the specific challenges facing the sector.[4]

 

9. Existing DFID support for HE is currently delivered through a number of routes, and the same is true of its HE support to Nigeria. DFID's research funding programme, through which it has committed to disbursing some £220 million annually by 2010,[5] supports a portfolio of research programmes across the world, including some of the major collaborative research initiatives such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), including IITA research stations in Nigeria, as well as a number of directly funded research programme consortia. With the research budget now formally untied, active measures which would assist universities in developing countries to access the funding opportunities that this offers would be particularly welcome.

 

10. In addition to its research funding, DFID also funds the Development Partnerships in Higher Education (DelPHE) scheme and the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, both of which seek to strengthen HE capacity and train individual academics.[6] Nigeria is one of the principal countries to benefit from the DFID-funded Research into Use programme, which aims to better understand how knowledge contributes to innovation, and to scale up the results of existing research. £3.5 million has also been provided to the Association of African Universities to create effective sub-regional HE networks on the continent, with Nigeria's Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta one of the first grant recipients.

 

Nigerian higher education

 

11. Nigeria's 27 federal, 31 state and 34 private universities offer considerable potential. They already contribute much valuable research and produce many very able graduates.[7] The challenge is for Nigeria to more effectively harness this research and graduate talent in support of national development. While HE enrolments have risen in recent years (from 6 to 10 per cent between 1999 and 2005), there are still too few places to meet demand; the Nigerian media reports that four million qualified candidates have failed to secure admission to Nigeria's universities in the last five years. [8] A long-term decline in the level of public funding for Nigerian universities has led to deteriorating infrastructure, and poor terms and conditions for many staff and there is currently a shortfall of some 8,000 academics. News reports suggest that 45% of the country's professors are due to be retired shortly unless the retirement age is raised to 70.[9] Obafemi Awolowo has already lost 76 to retirement in the last five years, while the University of Ibadan expects to lose a third of its 300 professors.

 

12. Nigeria is positioning itself to lead the continent's revitalisation of HE, with ambitions to develop world class universities, and hosting and co-funding the new African University of Science and Technology, a pan-African research institute located in Abuja and envisaged as one of a series of new continental centres of excellence. But while ambitious new flagship institutions will make an important contribution to research, large scale infrastructural support is urgently needed to revitalise the existing public university system, including institutions which were once world class in their own right. With its substantial reserves Nigeria will need to make significant investments from its own resources. Government spending on HE has risen from 12 billion naira in 1999 to 62 billion naira in 2006, and a recent commitment by the president to spend $223 million on refurbishing six federal universities, in each of Nigeria's six geopolitical zones, is to be welcomed. [10]

 

13. Nevertheless, donors can still play an important role by encourage this investment to be made, and by assisting in discrete areas. The problems that researchers address, and the knowledge they produce, move increasingly beyond national boundaries. Improving research capacity and practice therefore requires universities to collaborate internationally. This is particularly true of Nigeria where the level of existing participation in international research is much lower. Nigeria has itself recognised the need to build strong international links and the role for donors may therefore depend as much on creating and enabling good connections to international research networks, and encouraging the sharing of knowledge and experience, as it does on funding for research projects.

 

14. The ACU and British Academy, working with a group of African academics and university managers and resulting in the enclosed Nairobi Report, have identified the following areas as being critical to the revitalisation of university research. Although addressed to Africa more broadly, the experiences of the Nigeria colleagues involved in this project, and of UK academics working in Nigeria, indicate that these are equally salient within the Nigerian context.

 

Improving the structures, systems and governance of higher education

 

15. It is clear from the discussions represented by our report and from the work of other organisations that while poor funding for higher education presents not inconsiderable problems, many of the barriers to research are actually organisational and managerial. This is certainly true in Nigeria's huge and varied HE system. New money for research will only be provided where funders are confident that institutions have the ability to manage it effectively and to deliver good research, and this will depend on the systems and processes in place within institutions, and on the relationships between key staff.

 

16. Clear research agendas and postgraduate training plans are also lacking national level which means researchers lack coherent frameworks within which to work. A 2008 directive, supported by the Nigerian government, that all lecturers would need to hold a PhD by 2009 or risk losing their jobs was neither practical nor helpful; were every under-qualified lecturer to embark on a PhD programme existing teaching would only suffer further. While this clearly represented an impossible target, it nevertheless reflects the very real need to raise quality in teaching and research.

 

17. A common complaint within HE is the loss of the best academics to consultancy work. For many, consultancy nevertheless offers a vital source of additional income to supplement poor salaries. The undertaking of consultancy work need not simply be negative, or detrimental to the university system. Academics are rightly prized for their expertise and key areas, and contracted accordingly. Consultancy can provide new research opportunities, and a chance to undertake funded work which, if approached systematically, can contribute constructively to institutional research programmes. The challenge is for it to be managed more effectively within the university system.

 

Forging stronger research collaboration within Africa

 

18. Strengthening research in Nigeria requires academics to be better connected to their colleagues within the country, and at a regional level, as well as to the rest of the world. Improving academic networks within Nigeria must be a priority if the potential of the national HE system is to be realised, while intra-African collaboration must also be encouraged and supported within research funding programmes if a genuinely African research base is to develop. Selectivity is also important, and with very few institutions having the capacity to support a full programme of research in all fields it is clear that inter-university collaboration will be needed in order to develop sound research and teaching programmes which span all disciplines.

 

19. In recent years considerable emphasis has been placed on a 'centres of excellence' approach to revitalising HE in Africa, and the African University of Science and Technology, based in Abuja, is one of the first of these to be built. We nevertheless feel that if the system as a whole is to be strengthened, the focus should be on communities of research excellence between existing institutions. By building collaborative programmes in specific disciplines or subject areas, and by making use of institutional hubs as appropriate, research training and mentoring schemes could be delivered, and shared research programmes established, which aim for economies of scale, and leverage wider expertise.

 

Investing in individuals - the early research career

 

20. Ultimately it is individual scholars who will revitalise research. Investing in these individuals and ensuring that they are well supported will be critical to any revitalisation of HE within Nigeria. Importantly, this means that funding for research and funding for research training cannot be separated. DFID already provides support in both areas, through its scholarship funding through the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC), and through its research programme consortia and other research funding strands. The CSC, whose secretariat is hosted by the ACU, has already sought to improve these links by inviting DFID-funded research programmes to nominate for doctoral awards, but further ways of strengthening the links between these funding streams, currently managed by separate divisions within DFID, would be valuable, and would help to maximise existing support to Nigerian HE.

 

21. The need for greater numbers of PhD-trained Nigerian academics is huge and postgraduate training must be dramatically increased to meet this need. Achieving this at the scale required, and to make best use of the money available, will require new methods of delivery and new types of PhD. While we believe that much of this training must take place within Nigeria, split-site and distance learning approaches which provide for partnerships between African and UK institutions will undoubtedly be valuable. Greater attention also needs to be directed to supporting the postdoctoral careers of emerging researchers, to ensure that the benefits of PhD programmes and of scholarships are properly realised. A proper and practical career structure for junior researchers is needed, which offers a clear vision of progression from PhD study, provides sufficient time and support to ensure publishable work is produced, and which ensures robust projects and strong grant applications are developed worthy of external funding. Bringing these considerations more firmly into DFID's existing research and scholarship support to Nigerian HE would increase the likely impact of its funding.

 

Concluding comments

 

22. Improving the capacity of Nigeria to undertake high quality research, and thereby its ability to produce its own answers to its own problems is undoubtedly critical. The university sector is critical to delivering this, and if good research is to be achieved in an increasingly interlinked world, greater international collaboration will be vital. DFID and the UK research community can make a significant contribution to Nigerian research, and indeed already do in a number of ways. Supporting Nigerian HE, and improving the way in which UK support is delivered and directed, is firmly in the UK interest and should be an important part of DFID's overall programme in Nigeria.

 

23. The issues highlighted above are by no means the only challenges facing HE and research in Nigerian universities. They do, however, raise a number of important questions about the ways in which research and collaboration can best be supported as part of UK development programming. A more detailed discussion is provided in our enclosed report, which can also be accessed at www.britac.ac.uk/reports/nairobi/index.cfm. The Association of Commonwealth Universities and The British Academy would be happy to provide further comment on these issues to the Committee.

 

 

20 May 2009

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[1] Higher Education, DFID Briefing Paper, October 2008 www.dfid.gov.uk/Documents/publications/briefing-higher-educ-5.pdf

[2] The importance of higher education was emphasized by the Commission for Africa's 2005 report, in addition to earlier - and subsequent - reports by the World Bank and UNESCO. The most recent of these is the Bank's 2008 report 'Accelerating catch-up: tertiary education for growth in Sub-Saharan Africa': http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTAFRICA/Resources/e-book_ACU.pdf

[3] www.warima.org

[4] www.dfid.gov.uk/Documents/publications/post-primary.pdf and www.dfid.gov.uk/Documents/publications/briefing-higher-educ-5.pdf

[5] www.dfid.gov.uk/Documents/publications/research-strategy-08.pdf

[6] www.britishcouncil.org/delphe.htm, www.cscuk.org.uk

[7] Information on Nigeria's universities is collected at the National Universities Commission website: www.nuc.edu.ng

[8] Enrollment figures from UNESCO Global Education Digest 2008 www.uis.unesco.org.

[9] Media reports collected by University World News www.universityworldnews.com

[10] These are: the universities of Ilorin (North Central); Maiduguri (North East); Ahmadu Bello (North West); Benin (South); Nigeria Nsukka (South East); and Ibadan (South West).