Africa needs ‘innovation universities’ to develop – Calestous Juma

By Karen MacGregor – Africa Editor. In Africa Features, Esther Nakkazi unpacks a call by Harvard’s renowned scholar Calestous Juma for Africa to create ‘innovation universities’ that include commercialisation at their core if the continent is to achieve economic transformation, sustainable development and inclusive growth.
Wachira Kigotho probes a debate in the academic diaspora over pan-Africanism – an ideology that has a political agenda in its quest for solidarity between Africans globally – versus ‘Afropolitanism’, which is geared towards social progress, and Munyaradzi Makoni reports on the latest student eruption in South Africa, over a ‘rape culture’ at Rhodes University.
In Africa Analysis, Deren Temel contends that Africa cannot wait until 2030 for the next set of global goals to tackle the need for quality higher education, and suggests the sector partners with basic education to achieve its goals and focuses on improving teacher training – the only Sustainable Development Goal that supports higher education development.
In the latest in a series of articles on African university leadership, Wachira Kigotho describes a new memoir by Ratemo Waya Michieka on his experiences as vice-chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya.
And in another series on ‘Transformative Leadership’, in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Marcelo Knobel and Renato H L Pedrosa reflect on the leadership that brought Brazil’s University of Campinas within 50 years to the leading position it holds today. Read more...