Quality assurance of doctoral education is now urgent

It is widely acknowledged that one of the major causes of poor research output from Africa is the very low number of PhD graduates on the continent. A reflection of this is the fact that the proportion of academic staff having a PhD in African universities rarely exceeds 40% and, depending on the country and the subject, can be as low as 20%.

This also has an impact on the quality of undergraduate education which is why, at the 2015 African Higher Education Summit in Dakar, a commitment was made to ensure that 100% of academic staff in universities have a PhD by 2063.

In South Africa, which has one of the best higher education systems in Africa, the goal is for 75% of academic staff to have a PhD by 2030. Several African countries (for example, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal) have already specified that all university lecturers must have a PhD within a prescribed period.

Enrolment vs quality

The need to increase the output of PhDs in Africa has long been recognised. Indeed, almost all African universities have responded by making an effort to enrol PhD students, and there has been a significant increase in doctoral enrolment in almost all countries over the past decade.

Also, several major initiatives, funded by United States foundations, the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD, the African Union, the European Union and the World Bank, among others, have been launched in Africa over the past decades to promote research and postgraduate education in universities, and all of them have a strong component of PhD training.

But as PhD enrolment increases, the inevitable issue of the quality of the doctoral education arises. This is because in African universities, doctoral supervision is inadequate, a research environment is lacking, funding is insufficient and research facilities, especially for STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), are not always available.

African universities are in fact experiencing a similar challenge to that of massification at undergraduate enrolment – they do not have the capacity to cope with the increasing doctoral enrolment. The key issues related to PhD enrolment in Africa are captured in the comprehensive 2018 survey of doctoral education in six African countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa) undertaken jointly by the British Council and DAAD.

There are known cases all over Africa of a supervisor being assigned far too many PhDs to supervise, or of a supervisor having no research expertise in the PhD topic, or even of a supervisor not holding a PhD. It is hardly surprising therefore that the PhD graduation rate in most universities is very low, the dropout rate high and the time to completion often more than twice the prescribed time, although this is sometimes due to the PhD being undertaken on a part-time basis.

Plagiarism, essay mills and falsification of research results in doctoral dissertations are not uncommon, not only in Africa but all over the world. The news that the Commission for University Education of Kenya expressed serious doubts regarding the quality of over 100 PhDs awarded by a leading public university in Kenya is also disturbing.

All of this makes it clear that there is an urgent need for quality assurance of PhD programmes in African universities.

Assuring quality

Quality assurance (QA) in higher education is now becoming well-established in Africa and the majority of countries have established a national QA agency, or its equivalent, for higher education. However, the emphasis so far has been on undergraduate education, with hardly any attention being given to postgraduate education.

The external QA institutional audit, undertaken usually every five years, rarely examines the doctoral education process in depth. Also, except for a few countries, accreditation of doctoral programmes is not always effective.

The African Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ASG-QA), recently developed as an output of the Harmonisation of African Higher Education Quality Assurance and Accreditation (HAQAA) initiative under the African Union-European Union Partnership, is a valuable and much-needed document, but it provides no specific guidelines for doctoral education.

Similarly, in the self-evaluation questionnaire of the African Union’s African Quality Rating Mechanism (AQRM), the only information sought with regard to doctoral education is the number of doctoral students enrolled and the percentage student dropout rate of PhD programmes as a measure of quality of teaching and learning.

Assessing the quality of doctoral education requires a completely different approach. The emphasis here is on the supervisors’ capacity and commitment, the doctoral students’ preparedness for undertaking independent research, the institutional procedures, the specific resources available for the research, etc.

The process is complicated by the fact that the structure and format of doctoral education varies, ranging from a pure research model to one which has a heavy taught component. There are variations also in the methods of supervision, assessment and examination.

Most African universities have their own rules and guidelines for doctoral education in their regulations, having perhaps been drawn from those at international universities with which they partner, but these are often incomplete or insufficient. And to what extent these are always strictly adhered to is uncertain, so an external oversight through a QA process is necessary.

The World Bank’s Africa Centres of Excellence (ACEs) project is a good example to illustrate the need and urgency for assuring quality of doctoral education in Africa. There are currently 58 ACEs in 45 universities and 19 countries. They have so far enrolled about 2,400 doctoral students, and this number will invariably grow.

Since none of the countries has a robust QA system for doctoral education, the project requires any PhD programme to be regionally or internationally accredited, which has proved to be a challenge. As there is no regional accreditation agency, several of the ACEs have turned to accreditation by agencies in Europe or the US, at a significant cost. This is fortunately covered under the project, but the prohibitive cost would not be sustainable outside or after the project.

Recent developments

Two promising developments have recently taken place. First, in response to the fact that South Africa plans to increase its output of PhD graduates from roughly 3,000 per annum currently to 5,000 per annum by 2030, the Council on Higher Education (CHE) of South Africa, which is responsible for quality promotion and assurance, produced a ‘Qualifications Standard for Doctoral Degrees’ in November 2018.

The document was developed by a group of academic experts and validated through public comment. The standard defines two types of doctoral qualifications and outlines the attributes required by the candidate, as well as the necessary institutional conditions for admitting, supervising and assessing the PhD.

The CHE will now undertake an external audit of all South African universities offering a doctoral qualification using the standard as a reference document. This will perhaps be the first rigorous national quality audit of doctoral education in Africa.

The second development has taken place in the East African region and has been led by the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), a university membership organisation. In 2018, IUCEA produced ‘Standards and Guidelines for Postgraduate Studies in East Africa’, a document that was developed by a team of experts from the East African region, set up by the IUCEA. With support from DAAD, the team also benefitted from the input of a European expert on European experiences.

This document differs from the South African one in that it covers both masters and PhD degrees. However, a significant part of it, for example the sections on supervision and assessment, relates directly to doctoral studies. The other difference is that this document is primarily for universities for their internal QA system, whereas the South African one is designed mainly as an instrument for external QA.

Way forward

What is urgently required now is to have quality assurance standards and guidelines for doctoral education for use by QA agencies and universities across Africa, in much the same way as the ASG-QA, as not all African countries have the capacity to develop such standards and guidelines.

The question is: how and by whom can these be developed? A definite possibility is HAQAA. A second phase of HAQAA has now been launched and it might be possible, under that initiative, to develop such a document by building on the experiences from South Africa and East Africa, and bringing on board experiences from other parts of Africa as well as European practices, as was done for the ASG-QA.

Goolam Mohamedbhai is the former secretary general of the Association of African Universities, former president of the International Association of Universities and former vice-chancellor of the University of Mauritius. He is a former member of the governing council of the United Nations University and is a board member of University World News – Africa.