Can ARUA lead Africa on the path to research excellence?

The African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), driven by a need to establish a culture of publishing verifiable data about African universities, has launched a report titled Research Profiles of ARUA Universities: Emerging trends 2015-2017.

The data in the report, released virtually on 18 August, will be updated regularly to show ARUA’s growth and transformation.

Established in 2015, the African Research Universities Alliance is a network of 16 leading research universities from different countries in the region. They come from quite different historical backgrounds but have recently come to share a common vision.

Together, they have articulated a vision to expand and significantly enhance the quality of research done in Africa by African researchers.

A question that many observers around the world ask is whether they can realise their vision in view of the enormity of the task ahead of them.

This article shows the conditions at ARUA universities at the time they came together in 2015 and soon after that. The intention of the ARUA institutions is to change these conditions steadily over time, working together.

The article helps one to appreciate the similarities and differences among Africa’s flagship universities as they pursue change together.

The network brought together peer African institutions that agreed to work by combining resources. They justified the establishment of the network with the argument that, through collaboration, they would generate a ‘critical mass’ of the needed resources that could more effectively support their small but growing number of very good researchers.

This was in recognition of the fact that African higher education institutions could not afford the luxury of duplicated effort and cost in addressing shared challenges.

The initiators of the concept believed that the challenges confronting the development of research capacity in Africa were largely of a transnational nature, hence a transnational approach.

Underlying this was the conviction that the network could leverage the opportunity afforded it by the pooling of resources and effort to attract additional resources from external sources towards its goals.

The need to develop first-rate higher education institutions for postgraduate training and thereby curb the loss of the best minds to institutions of the Global North remains a central motivation for the establishment of ARUA.

The network, therefore, seeks to enhance graduate training through effective capacity-building and research excellence, particularly at doctoral level.

Trends in postgraduate training

As is the case with most public universities that were established in the early post-independence period in Africa, they were set up to produce mainly undergraduate students.

The exception would be some of the South African universities. The new African higher education institutions were designed to become the main instrument to produce human resources to manage mainly public institutions in the effort to transform the colonial economy.

In the past decade, however, many universities across the region began to reinvent themselves with a view to becoming more relevant within the context of an evolving and globalised higher education.

The adoption of broad mission and vision statements that expressed the desire of universities to become ‘research-intensive’ have gradually gained ground. Along with these broad changes have come reforms in the conduct of graduate education in many universities.

Noting that all the universities have been working on changing the narrative on admission and enrolment, the recent data on student enrolments at ARUA member universities (2015-17) reflects the variation across the institutions and the gradual change taking place.

While the data suggests that the trend may be changing slowly, the universities remain predominantly undergraduate institutions.

The University of Ibadan, Nigeria, with the largest proportion of postgraduates, had more than 50% of student enrolments as postgraduates in 2015, but this dropped to about 48% in 2017. The University of Pretoria also experienced a drop in postgraduate enrolments in the period 2015-17.

Apart from the Universities of Lagos, Ghana, Makerere, Rhodes and Dar es Salaam, all other ARUA institutions had more than a third of their enrolments as postgraduate students, and this was an improvement on earlier years.

There was also a marginal rise in the proportion of doctoral enrolments as a percentage of total enrolments in most of ARUA universities over the period from an average of 4.3% in 2015 to 4.7% in 2017. The plan for many of the universities is to get to 20% in this category within a decade.

Postgraduate enrolment as a percentage of total enrolment



Most of the postgraduate enrolments at ARUA universities are in the social sciences, while the smallest number are in the agricultural sciences.

Enrolments in science-related courses (natural sciences, medical and health sciences, engineering and technology and agriculture) constitute almost 50% of total postgraduate enrolments.

Postgraduate enrolments in ARUA universities by field of study in 2017



Not surprisingly, postgraduate enrolments at most ARUA universities are dominated by males. However, at the universities of Pretoria and the Witwatersrand (Wits), female postgraduate enrolments dominate and, in terms of field of study, this is mostly in the medical and health sciences.

Gender distribution of postgraduate enrolment by field



One of the biggest challenges confronting graduate education in Africa has been the length of time to completion of many programmes. There are many reasons for this, including the poor structure of the programmes, poor supervision and lack of commitment from students.

ARUA universities have committed to changing this experience, as reflected in their strategic plans. It is, therefore, not surprising that the completion times for doctoral studies across ARUA member universities experienced a general improvement over the period 2015-17.

The trend suggests that, increasingly, universities are putting in place structures and systems to ensure that doctoral training is efficiently managed.

PhD completion rates



Uptake of postdoctoral fellowships

ARUA universities are increasingly recognising the importance of postdoctoral research fellowships as a means of further expanding the capacity of PhD graduates. Postdoctoral fellowships provide the much-needed research-career shaping mentorship and networking for early career academics.

The data shows that, while the availability of fellowships across ARUA universities increased in 2015-17, this was mainly a South African thing.

The only other place to experience this growth was Makerere University. The other ARUA universities could not provide any data on postdoctoral research fellowships.

The observation suggests that most African universities still lack the systems and structures that support postdoctoral programmes as an integral part of a university system, despite the recognised need for change.

Postdoctoral research fellows in 2017



Academic staffing

ARUA has set itself the target that at least 75% of all faculty members will have PhDs within a decade. As the universities evolve into research-intensive universities, the need to enhance the capacity of academic staff to undertake cutting-edge research at the level of their peers around the globe has been emphasised.

The evidence suggests that, at most ARUA universities, about half of their permanent academic staff already have PhDs, except for Addis Ababa University where only about 30% have PhDs. It is interesting that, among ARUA universities, in 2017, the University of Ghana had the highest proportion of academic staff with PhDs – a total of 80%.

While South African universities are more likely to engage temporary academic staff, the use of non-permanent academic staff has decreased considerably at all the other universities.

Thus, all universities had more than 80% of academic staff as permanent staff except at Wits, Rhodes and the University of Cape Town.

In terms of gender, only two universities had more than 50% female staff – the University of Pretoria and Rhodes. Between 2015 and 2017, these patterns remained stable.

Academic staff distribution in 2017



What has changed?

ARUA universities are making significant progress in three main areas: doctoral enrolments, the completion time for doctoral enrolments and the proportion of permanent academic staff with PhDs.

Although there are considerable variations across ARUA universities, a pattern of increasing enrolments in doctoral programmes clearly emerges. The notable institutions in this regard are the universities of Ghana and Lagos, which witnessed significant increases in doctoral enrolments, although most of these enrolments were in the social sciences.

Furthermore, a pattern of growing gender equality is beginning to emerge in most doctoral programmes mounted by the majority of universities in South Africa.

For ARUA universities in Western and Eastern Africa, however, there is a prevalence of male dominance in various fields except at the University of Dar es Salaam.

Alongside increasing enrolment in doctoral programmes is the growing number of doctoral graduates who can complete their programme within four years, suggesting improvements in the efficiency with which doctoral programmes are managed.

Closely associated with this is the growing number of postdoctoral research fellowships at member universities, especially at South African universities. ARUA has recently developed a new programme of grants for early-career researchers that will facilitate mobility across the region.

About the proportion of permanent academic staff with PhDs, ARUA universities generally have more than half of their academic staff possessing PhDs with the share increasing over time.

Universities are taking steps to improve this steadily. Interestingly there is a female dominance in the proportion of permanent academic staff with PhDs at many of the South African universities.

We also observe the growing volume of research funding to the South African universities and the number of patenting activities.

Are ARUA universities among the best in Africa?

The leadership of ARUA maintains that it does not wish to develop an elitist club of privileged universities. The universities wish to take the lead in bringing about widespread transformation to the higher education landscape in the region. As they make steady progress on all the performance indicators, they would be able to pull others along.

ARUA universities, nevertheless, remain leading institutions of higher learning in their respective countries. This can be observed in the increasing proportion of postgraduate enrolments, the increasing shares of academic staff with PhDs and the growing diversity in both student enrolments and academic staff.

The main implication of this is that ARUA universities are increasingly recognising the importance of research and African scholarship in research. Also, it signals a steady migration away from the predominant focus on undergraduate studies to postgraduate studies.

This is accompanied by a growing interest at ARUA universities in exploring other external funding sources rather than relying on governments. Top universities across the world share these characteristics.

The Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA) project that reports on performance indicators of research universities in Africa provides a useful baseline for comparison with ARUA universities. It is important to note that five ARUA universities (namely, the universities of Cape Town, Ghana, Makerere, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi) participated in this project.

Consistent with the findings of the HERANA report, ARUA universities continue to experience increasing postgraduate enrolments, increases in the share of females in such programmes, as well as academics with doctoral degrees.

ARUA’s future outlook

ARUA continues to leverage the uniqueness and strengths of its member universities to pursue research excellence on the African continent.

One of the channels to do so has been the establishment of 13 Centres of Excellence across various science and non-science disciplines, each supported by funding from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).

In collaboration with the Guild of Research-Intensive Universities in Europe, and with anticipated support from the European Union, ARUA intends to establish another 40 centres of excellence across various fields of study at various universities, and these will be available to students and faculty from all African countries and their universities.

ARUA is planning a new future for the conduct of higher education in the region through the creation of what it calls the African University model.

This will be accomplished mainly through interdisciplinary doctoral academies to address some of the mobility and quality challenges associated with doctoral training in the region.

The doctoral academies will lay the foundation for harmonising doctoral training across member universities. They will support expanded mobility and promote joint supervision of PhDs across ARUA member universities.

The academies will enhance networking activities as well as create opportunities to significantly increase the amount of research done on the continent.

The planned doctoral academies are expected to benefit from equitable collaborations with various European and North American universities.

Professor Ernest Aryeetey is the secretary general of ARUA and the former vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana. Dr Emmanuel Abbey is the United Kingdom Research and Innovation project coordinator, Emmanuel Adu-Danso is the network manager at ARUA and Professor Gerald Ouma is the data project consultant based at the University of Pretoria. This is a commentary.