AllAfrica: A New Model to Strengthen Higher Education

For decades after sub-Saharan Africa’s emergence from the colonial era, its universities were weakened by civil strife and political turmoil.

Faculties of science and engineering declined as older professors retired faster than they were replaced; young graduates lacked financial support to complete their PhDs; professors lacked the resources to do research; and students and faculty alike found themselves professionally and geographically isolated from their peers.

Over the past decade, the urgency of this situation has become clear to institutions in Africa, and to some foundations and other donor organizations. I have had the privilege of chairing a small organization, the Science Initiative Group (SIG), that seeks to address these challenges. The objective of SIG, which consists of a board of international scientific experts and a small administrative office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is to help strengthen scientific capacity in developing countries. In partnership with Carnegie Corporation of New York, it supports a competitive program called the Regional Initiative in Science and Education (RISE) which allows post-graduate students and academic staff to work collaboratively and to advance in their professional careers.

RISE was designed during a series of discussions with African academic and scientific leaders. The more we learned about the damaging effects of academic isolation, the more strongly we saw the need for collaboration and partnerships. Therefore a defining feature of RISE is that it does not support individual people or institutions, but rather networks of academic institutions, each of which is required to have at least three member “nodes” in different countries. Five RISE networks were selected during a competition held in 2008 and judged by independent scientists. Although the scale of RISE is still small (we have supported about 140 students in the last five years), the program has become a credible model we hope to expand and strengthen in the coming years.

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