Blogs
A training approach for community health volunteers increased skilled birth attendance rates in six rural districts in Zambia by 63 percent from baseline over a two-year period. The training approach was developed for adult community health volunteers operating in a low literacy context. The UK aid-funded Mobilising Access to Maternal Health Services in Zambia (MAMaZ)… Read more
This Toolkit was developed to in response to the need to improve gender-mainstreaming initiatives in higher education in Africa, and build capacity within institutions, particularly with respect to mainstreaming gender in their human resource development policies and academic programs. The Toolkit, which is made up of the ten modules includes as an Appendix, a Literature Review, as well… Read more
Undernutrition among children is one of the most important health problems in developing countries. In order to understand the complex pathways affecting undernutrition which is crucial for policy interventions, one needs to explicitly model the dependence chain of immediate, intermediate, and underlying factors affecting undernutrition. Graphical chain models are used here to investigate the determinants… Read more
This essay chronicles the motivations behind the start of a Ashesi University by Patrick Awuah in Ghana. Following his education in engineering and economics at Swarthmore College and his fortune from stocks in Microsoft, Patrick Awuah quit his job as a Program Manager at Microsoft to start a college back home similar to his alma mater in his home country…. Read more
‘North-South Experiences of Doctoral Training for Development in Africa’ is a study of three models of partnership between Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and higher education institutes in six African countries. The goal of these partnerships is to deliver collaborative doctoral training programmes in global health, natural sciences and economics, to train researchers and build research… Read more
This paper is based on a study that set out to examine sustainable gender equity interventions in selected public universities in Kenya. The study, guided by the feminist critical policy analysis perspective following Bensimon and Marshall (1997), focused on interventions related to access to university education by women, curriculum transformation (inclusion), university environment (climate) and staff… Read more
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have taken the world of higher education by storm. Ubiquitous use of tablets and smartphones, rapid increase of broadband penetration, and the coming-of-college-age of the ‘digital native’ generation have led many top universities to offer some of their courses to a wider audience online, free of charge. Millions of students… Read more
The article illustrates how the South Africa–Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD), a doctoral research preparation programme for candidates on the African continent, evolved from an aid programme to an exemplary model of innovation, namely SANTRUST, an ownership-driven partnership within the framework of internationalization. This model of innovation includes a programme with a… Read more
The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (Partnership) was a ten-year funder collaborative that sought to strengthen higher education in Africa. The Partnership focused its support on universities in nine countries: Egypt, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. In ten years, the Partnership specifically, Increased spotlight on the importance of higher education in… Read more
This report presents the findings of a scoping study on university-industry linkages in Africa to determine what interface structures, policies, positions, incentives, and funding avenues are currently in place (or lacking) and what services or interventions African institutions themselves gauge to be most important for strengthening their efforts. This study was conducted by the Association… Read more
This study examines the relationships between industry and universities in Africa, in the context of pressure on higher education institutions for more relevance to economic and social needs. The analysis draws on in-depth qualitative data obtained through 32 elite interviews with key informants from higher education, business, government, and international aid agencies, across 13 linguistically… Read more