By Ongaga Ongaga
Africa should stop trying to reproduce Western university models and instead build higher education systems designed around its own economic, social and demographic realities, University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey has said.
Speaking at the Higher Education Transformation Convening in Accra, Ghana recently, Tracey challenged African policymakers and university leaders to rethink how universities are designed, funded and connected to the economies they serve.
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Her message was striking given that she leads Oxford, one of the world’s oldest and most influential universities.
Rather than treating institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge as templates to be copied, Tracey said African countries have an opportunity to develop new approaches to higher education from the ground up.
She argued that African universities could embrace more flexible learning pathways, including short and stackable qualifications, apprenticeships, entrepreneurship and stronger links between universities and industry.
For countries such as Kenya, where thousands of young people enter the labour market every year, such an approach could mean closer collaboration between universities, employers and emerging sectors.
Tracey also challenged the traditional residential university model, noting that access to higher education should not depend on students being able to relocate to large campuses.
A student in Turkana, for instance, should be able to access quality higher education without necessarily having to move to Nairobi or another major university town.
The same principle could apply to students in Kenya’s rural counties, where distance, cost of accommodation and transport can make university education difficult even after admission.
The Oxford vice-chancellor also questioned whether curricula should continue to be designed largely within universities, with limited input from the industries expected to employ graduates.
She pointed instead to stronger links with sectors such as agribusiness, technology, the informal economy and the creative industries.
Kenyan universities are currently grappling with questions about graduate employability, funding, technology and the changing demands of the labour market.
Tracey said Oxford itself was learning from Africa through partnerships in areas including vaccine research, climate adaptation and humanities.
That, she suggested, showed that knowledge should not flow in only one direction.
She noted that Africa’s best universities may not be the ones that look most like Oxford, but those that understand best what their own societies need.
