Academics increase research output during COVID

Academics at Uganda’s Makerere University appear to have taken advantage of the lull in face-to-face teaching caused by COVID-19 to increase their research output, a self-assessment study has suggested. Research publications from Kampala-based Makerere, one of Africa’s oldest universities, rose from 992 papers in 2019 to 1,301 in 2020.

The university’s Quality Assurance Directorate (QAD) said that the highest number of research publications produced over the past year came from the College of Health Sciences faculty, with 537 papers.

The college runs programmes such as medicine and surgery, pharmacy, biomedical engineering and biomedical sciences, among others. The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences followed with 194 publications.

“The past year seems to have been one of the most productive for Makerere. A lot of this progress could be attributed to the academic staff being home for a long period of time, so they decided to take advantage of their stay at home to complete their research work,” said Dr Vincent Ssembatya, the QAD director at Makerere.

Higher education institutions in Uganda began to close their doors to physical learning from last March (2020) to control the virus. Many have reopened to students over the past few months.

“Because the academic staff was not teaching or had less student contact, they had time to think and become more productive,” Ssembatya told University World News.

“Looking at the numbers, that’s almost one publication per staff, per year. And these are publications in peer-reviewed journals that focus on impactful topics. This is not something to be taken for granted.”

The two colleges have traditionally had the strongest research output at Makerere: “This is because there are still a lot of health issues we have to deal with, such as HIV, malaria and food insecurity that require solutions to be found through research and new ideas to be generated,” said the QAD director.

Academic staff qualifications

That said, COVID-19 has encouraged health and environmental specialists at Makerere to intensify research and finding solutions to contain the pandemic.

For instance, researchers at the Makerere University School of Public Health have developed an inexpensive COVID-19 diagnostic test kit, able to produce results in a few minutes. The equipment is, itself, still being assessed for validation, but the work is under way.

Ssembatya added that the increased research productivity registered by the university had been aided by the growing number of faculty staff holding doctoral degrees in recent years, which encourages research and innovation.

Currently, 900 of 1,400 academics at Makerere hold PhDs, said Dr Ssembatya, which also boosts undergraduate training – with some of these graduates becoming PhD candidates and researchers in turn.

Professor Adipala Ekwamu, a Ugandan who heads the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a consortium of 129 universities across Africa, welcomed the development, saying that the large and growing number of students at Makerere has, in recent years, taken the focus of the academic staff away from research towards teaching.

Currently, Makerere University has 32,000 students, up from about 5,000 in the 1990s.

Of the current number of students, 5,000 participate in graduate programmes (PhDs and masters).

Makerere is the only university in Uganda that ranks among the first 500 of the Times Higher Education global rankings, at 401, attracting students from, among others, Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Liberia and Cameroon.

“The dilemma facing Makerere is that, with the high student numbers, it became more of a teaching university than a research university,” said Ekwamu. “That is not good because teaching should be based on knowledge generated through research.”

As a result, “One of the positive outcomes of the COVID-19 lockdown was that it created time for university academic staff to focus more on their research and … publication,” he said.

He argued that universities in Uganda (and, indeed, across Sub-Saharan Africa) need to make research a core part of their agenda to generate innovation and new ideas, giving a solid and dynamic foundation to knowledge imparted to students.

A sharper research focus

Ssembatya acknowledges that the university has, for some time, focused on teaching rather than research, but argued that the situation was, in any case, slowly changing.

“Makerere University has, for a long time, been doing things that traditional universities do,” he said.

However, the university has made recent decisions to encourage a greater focus on research.

“That’s why our priorities are changing and that’s why we are changing some of these courses,” Ssembatya said, noting that the university is phasing out at least 18 undergraduate degree courses in the 2021-22 academic year as part of a rationalisation process.

This includes bachelor degrees on archives and record management; development studies; and industrial and organisational psychology.

“We must only keep courses that we know other universities [in Uganda] have no capacity or only limited capacity to provide, such as medicine, engineering and agriculture,” said Ssembatya.

Some courses will be merged. For instance, the bachelor of statistics programme will be merged with the bachelor of business statistics, while the bachelor of development economics course will be merged with the bachelor of economics course.

These reforms will see the number of bachelor courses the university offers fall from the current 100 to 60 over the next 10 years.

“We wanted to cut the curriculum to 50 courses but a lot of planning needs to go into the process. So, for now, we are keeping it at 60 because we want to offer relevant, good-quality education,” said Ssembatya.

“We want to make sure that, when a student leaves the university, [their qualifications and learning] have a longer shelf life because the university of the future is one that is going to deploy solutions, and that can only happen when you have the relevant programmes,” he added.

One crucial step forward for the university, Ssembatya said, is to secure increased funding from the government, helping to create a suitable environment that supports scientific research output while, at the same time, improving the quality of teaching offered to students.

He explained that the government needs to fund scientific research that is relevant and linked to the country’s national development plans.

Currently, only 0.3% of the nation’s GDP is spent on research, said Ssembatya, with the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology claiming the proportion is 0.5%.

Most of the funding for research at Makerere University has come from external private and international development agency sources and totals about US$200 million annually, said Ssembatya.

“If the government could spend at least 1% of Uganda’s GDP on research, it could go a long way in addressing some of these development challenges,” he said.

Given that Uganda’s GDP was US$35.1 billion in 2019, according to the World Bank, that would amount to US$351 million.