Reflections on the incentive structures at African universities and their impact on the direction and performance of the continent’s development

Research has proven that there is a clear positive correlation between the level of education in a country and its economic development. The Asian tiger economies invested heavily in higher education as one of the precursor for their rapid economic development. Africa is trying to do the same: in the past 20 years African universities have gone from elite to mass education institutions. However, while societies develop rapidly, especially in urban areas, the African graduates are to a large degree getting the same kind of education as their grandfathers. While the universities as institutions had to adapt to changing conditions there has been little change in the learning paradigm, making African graduates ill equipped to address 21st century challenges. The current skills gap is diminishing the ability both at aggregate (continental) as well as national level to use the full potential of their educated elite to boost societal and economic development. In past decades there have been many initiatives and projects trying to update the academic learning paradigm within African Universities but with limited impact. Based on extensive recent visits to universities in Africa hypotheses are proposed that this might partly be related to the fact that many of the existing incentive structures governing higher education are poorly aligned to the quality and local relevance of training and research programs; and by implication the graduates being chunned out. Furthermore, relevant policies and existing structures for securing quality higher education are often also poorly enforced so they do not have the intended effect on the behaviour of faculty and management behaviour

Participatory Development Research. Enhancing Capacity within Applied Research - Case: Livestock

The acceptance of the ideals of participatory and cross-disciplinary approaches in agricultural research for development is now widespread in the development sector and with good reason. However, in spite of the importance of these approaches when addressing smallholder livestock farming systems the real success stories are few, probably because of the difficulties in cross-disciplinary research and the lack of a clear understanding of participatory approaches among many researchers. There is a need to share experiences with these approaches among researchers and development officers. This paper uses three examples of Danida funded research for development projects to discuss ideas of participatory action research and cross-disciplinarity against experiences from the field. Action research is an activity that combines research and development by trying to help local people solving an immediate problematic situation and simultaneously building general knowledge using scientific methods. This gives the researcher a dual role as participant and observer of the system through the phases of the research cycle, e.g. problem identification, planning of interventions, implementation/action and finally observation as a basis for another round starting with a revised problem description. Cross disciplinarity is needed to research the complex interactions between crops, livestock, farm management and off-farm activities in smallholder systems and their link with questions such as marketing, environmental pressure, gender issues and poverty. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers vary in the extent of integration of the different disciplines from Multidisciplinary over Inter- to Trans-disciplinary and it seems important to be aware of the ambitions in a project from the outset. Large resources are needed to carry out truly Trans-disciplinary research because time is needed for researchers to agree on a common methodology, coordinate data recording and interpretation which give both Intra-Project and Extra-project challenges. The challenges of participation and cross-disciplinarity were addressed differently in the three reviewed projects as demonstrated in the paper. Important experiences for researchers and results for farmers have been gained in all three projects but none of them succeeded in being both Cross-disciplinary and truly participatory at the same time. The projects demonstrate a significant development during their lifetime and a clear commitment by the researchers to serve development purposes involving local stakeholders at different stages in the process. These experiences should therefore encourage a more widespread interaction between development programmes and research in the future. It has proven difficult to establish and maintain cross-disciplinary research projects for a number of reasons, some of which rely on researcher attitudes and traditions and others on funding mechanisms