World-class or flagship: which way for African universities?

By Sharon Dell – Acting Africa Editor. In Africa Analysis, Amasa P Ndofirepi and Michael Cross argue that African universities should aspire to the status of ‘flagship’ rather than ‘world-class’ universities, and Southern African Regional Universities Association CEO Piyushi Kotecha writes about the significance for harmonisation of a new regional masters curricula in climate change and development.
In Africa Features, Gilbert Nakweya highlights the way in which universities in Kenya and Uganda are struggling to meet their mandates in the context of funding shortfalls, while Sharon Dell outlines the implications for higher education of a recent national report on skills demand and supply in South Africa.
In a series on Transformative Leadership in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Sharon Dell reports from a meeting of the International Association of University Presidents on the importance of forging equal higher education partnerships to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in the context of global inequalities.
In Global Commentary, Natalia Shmatko encourages Russian PhD holders to further develop international academic cooperation and in particular consider simultaneous mobility, where a researcher works for several organisations located in different countries at the same time and is based either in one of them or in the home country. And Anand Kulkarni writes that global university rankings and comparisons with China indicate that India needs to do more to spread excellence and become more internationally oriented in its higher education system. Read more...