A research initiative will bring together Irish and African universities to aid development, writes Andy Pollak.
CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITIES are often criticised for their obsession with management, funding and status. When they look abroad it seems to be mainly to attract lucrative research contracts from US multinationals or high fee-paying overseas students. Sometimes John Henry Newman's definition of universities as "schools of universal learning" seems very remote from the modern reality.
Through a remarkable initiative launched by President Mary McAleese at Dublin City University this month, the Irish universities are trying to change this image.
The initiative is the Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building (IAPRCB), which will bring together all nine universities on the island of Ireland with four universities in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi.
The aim of this project is nothing less ambitious than to use the research expertise of the Irish universities to work with the African universities to make a contribution to the struggle against poverty, disease and discrimination in these countries, which are all priority recipients of Irish development aid.
The idea came out of a visit by Universities Ireland - the all-island network of university presidents - to Uganda in November 2005, where they met a wide range of African university leaders. When Irish Aid - the Department of Foreign Affairs' development co-operation division - launched a programme at the end of 2006 to try to involve the universities more in work with developing countries, Universities Ireland brought together all the universities and put in a bid for funding.
In Uganda they had heard of the huge problems faced by African universities.
The head of the Association of African Universities, Prof Akilagpa Sawyerr, has written widely about the "tragedy" of international pressure - led by the World Bank - to run down the African higher education system in favour of primary education in the 1980s and 1990s at the very moment of the rise of the knowledge society and an explosion in demand for third-level education in Africa.
As a result of that neglect, African universities today face a multitude of problems: chronic underfunding, deteriorating infrastructure, poorly-equipped libraries and laboratories, intermittent electricity supply, huge class sizes, high failure rates, underpaid staff, and an inexorable brain drain of the best academic and administrative talent. Research has been the major casualty of all this attrition.
It is now universally recognised that knowledge creation is at the heart of economic activity in the modern world.
Every society must have the capacity to generate, acquire and apply knowledge if it is to create wealth and overcome poverty. On top of other daunting challenges, developing countries now face a very real threat from unequal access to knowledge.
African countries are far more dependent than developed countries on universities for what Prof Sawyerr calls "research and knowledge generation and adaptation".
He argues that "the strength of Africa's universities is a key condition for its development, and their weakness is an index of, as well as a contributor to, its poverty".
In recent years, as funding has started slowly to rise again, the Association of African Universities has started successfully to tackle some of these problems.
It oversees collaborative programmes to undertake research on higher education policy and management to increase the knowledge base in this vital area; summer institutes in areas like democratic governance and gender; and a Nigerian-based National Mathematical Centre.
The IAPRCB will work with Makerere University in Uganda, Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania, Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique and the University of Malawi to build their research capacity in the key areas of health, education, information and communication technologies (ICT) and gender.
They will carry out a stakeholder consultation among the 13 participating universities to establish the research needs of the African universities and Irish universities' capacity to work in partnership to meet those needs.
They will undertake a pilot foresight exercise, successfully used by Irish Government agencies like Forfás, to plan for future social and economic change, to identify the African universities' potential contribution to their countries' future wellbeing.
And they will work to train a new generation of African researchers capable of producing knowledge relevant to their nations' needs, and, more specifically, to their poverty reduction strategies.
This is a unique North-South initiative. All nine universities in the Republic and Northern Ireland are participating, with project management and research staff based in Dublin City University, Queen's University Belfast, Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick), Trinity College Dublin and the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh.
Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, secretary of Universities Ireland, and administrative leader of the Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building