Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world on student mobility

University students in Sub-Saharan Africa have become the most mobile tertiary students in the world, as about 5% of the 8.1 million tertiary students on the continent have crossed a border, as compared to the global average of 2.4%, according to Campus France, a public agency that attracts and provides educational services to international students studying in France.

In a report, Campus France noted that more than 404,000 university students from Sub-Saharan Africa are currently studying outside their homeland. Indicators suggested that the region’s number of outbound students will continue to rise, as the total student population is expected to reach 22 million by 2027.

Nigerian students in the lead

Nigeria is the region’s leading country of origin. Its volume of mobile students grew by 50% in five years, reaching 85,000 in 2017 and occupying the eighth position globally in terms of outbound students, according to Campus France data-sets.

Nigeria is followed by Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Angola, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya in terms of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with high numbers of university students outside their homeland.

As a result of ties with its former colonies, France has been the most popular destination for students from Sub-Saharan Africa, currently hosting about 110,000 students, or 27% of the region’s mobile students. But, in the past 10 years, the mobility of African students has become highly diversified, with China, the United States, Malaysia, Canada, India and Saudi Arabia eroding entries to France.

For instance, China’s aggressive recruitment through the awarding of scholarships saw the number of students from Sub-Saharan Africa to its universities increase from about 27,000 students in 2012 to 81,562 in 2018.

Albeit in a modest fashion, Sub-Saharan African students in the United States rose steadily from 35,364 in the 2015-16 academic year to 41,697 in 2019-20.

An up-and-coming student market

“Over the past five years, the number of students from Sub-Saharan Africa in the United States grew by 29.5%,” noted the United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

What is emerging is that Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a target area for recruitment of international students. The issue is that, although the region has the lowest number of university students among all the global regions, it is also the place where the student population is growing the fastest.

“Africa is the new China, population-wise. It is an up-and-coming market,” said Adina Lav, the assistant provost for international enrolment at George Washington University.

That claim does not seem to be an exaggeration, taking into account that Africa has one of the world’s fastest-growing college-aged populations. In this regard, the emerging continental youth bulge is expected to drive student mobility in the 21st century, according to ICEF Monitor, a resource for the international education industry.

Catalysts for higher mobility

But, beyond the demographic surges, there are immediate factors that are making mobility more palatable to students in Sub-Saharan Africa than their counterparts elsewhere. The unmet demand for higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa as a result of saturation of universities in the region has become a major catalyst, according to Beatrice Khaiat, the general director of Campus France.

“Currently, about three-quarters of the students from Sub-Saharan Africa who earn their degree outside their home country earn it outside Africa,” said Khaiat.

The real or perceived uneven quality of degrees and diplomas is also driving African students to foreign destinations such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the US. The issue is that, in competition for a job, a student is interested in a degree that will provide an edge over candidates with similar degrees, stated ICEF Monitor.

The idea that a degree obtained outside their country is of higher quality than that from a local university is rife in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, a factor that tends to influence the affluent urban middle-classes towards sending their children abroad to earn a bachelor or a masters degree.

Subsequently, instead of using financial resources to improve the quality of under-funded local public universities, some African countries are using huge sums of money to allocate scholarships to students to study abroad. “For instance, nearly 40% of outbound Nigerian students hold scholarships, most of which are funded by oil revenues,” stated Campus France.

Career prospects

But, while a large segment of student mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects free and parental choices, Khaiat argued that outflows are being influenced by national and global political and economic trends. In this context, pressures caused by conflict and political turmoil have played a major role in African study mobility, with countries in conflict listing regular spikes of outbound students.

Economic instability and the prevailing graduate unemployment crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa have transformed the region into one of the global untapped markets for international students.

According to Esther Benjamin, the CEO of World Education Services, more than 40% of students from Sub-Saharan Africa usually cite future career prospects as the most important factor in making their choice to study outside their homeland.

Although Asia is expected to remain a leading source of international students, ICEF Monitor predicts Sub-Saharan Africa is quickly becoming a hot spot for the next wave of student mobility as marketers target countries with huge college-aged populations.

According to the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the spotlight is on Angola, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Affordability

But, whereas outbound students from Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to benefit from a high-quality university education, or to follow a professional curriculum not available back home, there is the nagging question of affordability.

According to Benjamin, a large number of outbound postgraduate students from Sub-Saharan Africa have an average budget of less than US$20,000 a year. “Compared to students from other countries or regions, these students noted that every aspect of the cost related to higher education was very important to them,” said Benjamin.

In this context, in which Sub-Saharan Africa’s youth bulge is expanding, there are questions as to whether the demand for study abroad will get more intense.

According to Professor Yann Lebeau, the head of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of East Anglia, the gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education in other world regions rose between 21% and 84% from the 1990s to the present time while, in Sub-Saharan Africa, it still stands at 11%.

“While the whole world progressed towards mass higher education, the Sub-Saharan African region stagnated with levels of participation unable to absorb an increasing demand,” said Lebeau in Higher Education Expansion and Social Inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa: Conceptual and empirical perspectives, a study that he co-authored with Professor Ibrahim Oanda Ogachi, the programmes coordinator at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.

The two scholars argued that, despite increased student enrolment inside, or outside their country of origin in the region and beyond, higher education remains out of reach for large segments of the population. “Everywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, unavailability, inaccessibility and unattainability combine and perpetuate increasingly unequal higher education systems,” noted the study.

Further commenting on the issue, Ogachi told University World News that competition for access to reputable institutions either locally or outside the region will not be driven merely by the youth bulge but by students’ socio-economic backgrounds and political influence.

Besides, new forms of inequalities are emerging in various countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that could prevent a large segment of the youth bulge to get over barriers to enrolment and access to higher education, whether locally or abroad.

Examples from Kenya and other Sub-Saharan African countries, earmarked as ripe for the predicted increased outward student mobility, suggest that patterns are skewed towards economically endowed regions, as well as conforming to ethnic and gender realities.

There are about 5.3 million outbound students globally and although UNESCO states the number might increase rapidly over the next few years, the barriers that continue to exist suggest that the larger part of this group might not be from Sub-Saharan Africa in the near future.