Re-imagining Africa as a Knowledge Economy: Premises and Promises of Recent Higher Education Development Initiatives

Introduction

Before the advent of the knowledge economy discourse, African governments had been discouraged for decades from investing in their higher education (HE) systems. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the period when the indebtedness of African countries deepened and economic recession undermined social services (including education), the World Bank, the leading external education financer in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Jones, 2007), justified its educational lending on the basis of the social rate of return to investment in different levels of education (Samoff and Carrol, 2004). Maintaining that investment in HE had lower social returns, the Bank called for the redirection of public funding to basic education on the grounds of greater social benefits (Heyneman, 2003). At a conference with African vice-chancellors in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1986, the World Bank is reported to have argued that ‘higher education in Africa was a luxury and that most African countries were better off closing universities at home and training graduates overseas’ (quoted in Banya and Elu (2001: 23)). The ensuing change in focus of the World Bank from higher to basic education, coupled with a serious economic and political crisis since the mid-1970s, contributed to what Samoff and Carrol (2004) call a period of ‘higher education decay’ in Africa. Speaking in 2003, Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, Secretary of State for Education in Gambia, was emphatic:

To this day, many countries have not been able to recover from that onslaught on African higher education. Some of our finest institutions have thus almost been destroyed, thanks to the imposition of bad policies from partners who, in the first place, came out professing to help us. What we received from them was the kiss of death! (quoted in Samoff and Carrol (2004: 1).

The effect of the prolonged neglect of African HE systems was that the region remained on the periphery of the global knowledge economy system. Consequently, Africa ranks lowest in key knowledge economy indicators, including: (a) stocks of knowledge (e.g. the number of qualified researchers, the size of the science and engineering workforce); (b) knowledge creation (e.g. investment in research and development, information and communications technologies (ICT), and education and training; research outputs); and (c) number of patents (Powell and Snellman, 2004). On average, African countries have 35 scientists and engineers per million of population compared to 168 for Brazil and 4103 for the US (ADF, 2013: 2). According to the UNESCO Science Report 2010, the continent of Africa had 164 researchers per million individuals in 2007, while the world average was 1081 researchers per million. The situation was even more dire in SSA, which had only 79 researchers per million of population during this period (UNESCO, 2010). Further confirming this lack of capacity, Africa accounts for about 15% of world population but contributes only 0.07% of the world’s patent applications (World Bank, 2014b), and produces only 1.1% of world scientific knowledge, as measured by publications in scientific journals (ADF, 2013: 2). Africa’s world share in research and development expenditure fell from 1.3% in 1990 to 0.8% in 2000 (UNECA, 2008: 9). Although African governments agreed, in what has come to be known as the ‘Khartoum Decision’, to allocate at least 1% of GDP on research and development by 2010, most remain far from achieving this commitment (AfDB, 2008; 3).

Through a combination of factors, which include the global rise of the knowledge-driven economy and, under its weight, the dramatic volte-face of donors (e.g. the World Bank) in their approach to HE in the developing world, Africa has become imaginable as a knowledge economy. Under the influence of global and regional policy agents (e.g. AfDB, 2008; AU, 2010a, 2015b; World Bank, 2007, 2014d), and in line with experiences of countries in other regions of the world, nations in Africa have sought to revitalise HE systems through national and regional initiatives. Enabled by shifts in global aid policy, which now embraces support for HE after decades of neglect, and in the face of exponential growth in undergraduate enrolments, the focus is now on increasing the capacity for research within Africa. HE and, by extension, advanced research capability, have been re-cast from the ‘luxury’ that African countries could not afford (Samoff and Carrol, 2004; Obamba, 2013), to a vital and enabling factor for participation in the global knowledge economy (TFHES, 2000).

Clear evidence of the discursive re-positioning of Africa in the global knowledge economy came in July 2015 during the visit of US President Barack Obama to Kenya and Ethiopia, in which the trajectory of African development from aid dependency to entrepreneurialism was re-iterated in public addresses by Obama and the African leaders with whom he met. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta tellingly observed: ‘Gone are the days when the only lens to view our continent was one of despair and indignity’ (quoted in Smith and Mutiga, 2015: paragraph 7). Africa, according to Kenyatta, is on the verge of a ‘Renaissance’, it is ‘open for business’; for Obama, it is ‘on the move’ (Smith and Mutiga, 2015) and its educated youth hold the key to its future. In this narrative, as argued in this article, HE is seen to hold the key to the generation of the highly-skilled workforce required for knowledge-led economic growth. It is against this backdrop that the current HE revitalisation policy moment is enacted.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on key recent HE development initiatives in the region, which we interpret as signals of a significant re-imagining of Africa as a knowledge economy. Four specific initiatives have been selected for analysis: the African Union’s Establishment of the Pan African University (2010); the World Bank’s Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence Project (2014); The Kigali Communiqué on Higher Education for Science, Technology and Innovation (2014); and the First African Higher Education Summit’s Declaration and Action Plan on Revitalizing Higher Education for Africa’s Future, Dakar, Senegal (2015). As little is yet known about outcomes of, and responses to, recent HE initiatives, the account presented in this paper lays the groundwork for further critical analysis.

The remaining part of the paper proceeds in four sections. Following an outline of the methodology for the research in the first section, the second presents an account of the four selected recent African HE development initiatives. The third section problematises issue-framing in the nominated initiatives. Finally, by way of conclusion, we reflect on policy silences and inconsistencies, and highlight the challenges facing Africa’s realisation of its potential as a knowledge economy.

Methodology and sources

Methodologically, the paper is informed by issue-framing analysis of selected publicly available policy texts and other related relevant documents. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) defines frames as cognitive perceptual structures that individuals use to perceive and represent the reality that they encounter in daily life. They are ‘sense-making’ conceptual constructs ‘that shape the way we see the world’ (Lakoff, 2004: xv), and delineate boundaries to direct attention to a specific target. Seen from a policy perspective, frames define what is seen as an important public agenda and what is marginalised as inconsequential.

Education policy, as any other policy arena, is a site of contested values, especially when it involves the translation of a globally-defined agenda into local practices, as is the case with the initiatives discussed below. As documented in Molla (2013, 2014), following widespread criticism of coercive pathways of policy influence such as aid conditionality, donors increasingly rely on knowledge-based regulatory instruments. They discursively frame their policy preferences, priorities and choices. In a policy process, framing refers to the act of signifying some issues as problems using specific types of constructs that fit the policy agent’s worldview and interest while marginalising alternative issues and agendas. Hence, issue-framing analysis enables us to unmask what issues are prioritised in policies, whose interests are represented, and what perspectives and alternatives are excluded as irrelevant or non-existent. In other words, issue-framing analysis takes into account contexts, power relations and agents interacting in a policy space. Focusing on discursive constructions of meaning and associated material effects, policy frame analysis, as one aspect of critical discourse analysis, aims to detect silences, multiplicity of intentions and latent inconsistencies (Rein and Schön, 1996).

The main sources of data are publicly available policy texts and other related relevant documents, including the African Union’s Establishment of the Pan African University Statute (AU, 2010b); the World Bank’s Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence Project (World Bank, 2014a); The Kigali Communiqué on Higher Education for Science, Technology and Innovation (the Government of Rwanda and the World Bank, 2014); and the 1st African Higher Education Summit’s Declaration and Action Plan on Revitalizing Higher Education for Africa’s Future (TrustAfrica, 2015). These initiatives are viewed as expressions of the new imaginary, and strategies to realize that imaginary.

Revitalising African HE: Four recent initiatives

While the concept of the knowledge economy first emerged in the 1960s (Drucker, 1969; Machlup, 1962), it remained relatively arcane until it was taken up by global policy agents such as the OECD (1996), UNESCO (1996) and the World Bank (1999) in key publications that exerted influence on policy making in both regional and national settings. Especially with the introduction of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (World Bank, 2004) in the early 2000s in many SSA countries, human capital development refracted through knowledge economy thinking has become a prominent HE reform agenda. Increasingly educational expenses, both individual and social, are seen as an investment in human capital development. It is argued that HE institutions support the knowledge economy through producing relevant knowledge, training knowledge workers and facilitating the conversion of knowledge into innovation (Bloom, 2005; Godin, 2006; World Bank, 2009). Workers with continuing learning capabilities, flexibility and skills are the key drivers of the knowledge economy system. Guided by such expectations, HE reforms in Africa have been primarily concerned with addressing issues of efficiency and relevance: that is, whether or not the system has the capacity to meet the economic expectations of society (Riddel, 1999). Subsequently, HE institutions are placed under pressure to tailor education and training to fit the demands of the labour market, which is being progressively re-imagined as one for which knowledge and innovation are central.

In the current conditions of the global knowledge economy, the education sector has become a ‘complex economy in its own right’ (Robertson and Dale, 2015: 153). In developed and developing countries alike, economic growth and productivity constitute the main goals of education and training. Policy effectiveness is primarily measured by cost and economic benefits; institutional viability increasingly depends on profitability; curricular reforms endorse contents for the development of entrepreneurial competence; and learning outcomes are assessed against employability and worker productivity. As Moutsios (2009: 479) observes ‘we are experiencing, at the most official level, not only the transnationalisation of education policy making but also the subjugation of education to the mandates of the global economy’.

With the prevalence of knowledge economy discourse in the global policy space, HE has been propelled into the centre of national economic policy plans and strategies. In the context of Africa, starting from the early 2000s, international organisations (e.g. the World Bank) and regional agencies such as the African Union (AU) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) have championed the agenda of revitalising African HE, with particular attention to aligning the system with the economic development needs and strategies of national governments (Altbach, 2013). If HE institutions are to contribute to national economic growth and transformation, the argument goes, there should be a high level of knowledge productivity achieved through a critical mass of research workforce participants across private and public sectors as well as research centres, institutes and think tanks. The expectation has been that, with the increase of knowledge-intensive economic production, distribution and consumption, the number of research positions both within and outside the HE system will be considerably increased.

As part of the renewed HE revitalisation movement that aims at building the knowledge productivity of African countries, development partners such as the World Bank and regional policy actors (e.g. the AU and AfDB) have put new initiatives in place. These global and regional actors, together with national policymakers, hold that an increased investment in, and expansion of, postgraduate programmes enhances the institutional research capacity of universities and, following the knowledge economy narrative, strong research capacity may be then mobilised to drive technological innovation and economic productivity. In this section, we present four examples of recent global and regional initiatives toward the revitalisation of African HE.

The World Bank’s Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence Project (2014–2018)

The World Bank is the largest external source of education funding for SSA (Jones, 2007). As of July 2015, the Bank funded a total of 544 HE projects, of which 168 were in Africa. Over 250 of the total number of projects had ‘education for the knowledge economy’ as a theme (World Bank, 2015d). According to Claudia Costin, Senior Director for Education at the World Bank Group, ‘The World Bank invests 20% of its education budget for Sub-Saharan Africa in higher education, representing approximately $600 million’ (World Bank, 2015a). The Bank uses what can be referred to as ‘knowledge aid’ as an instrument for the discursive dissemination of policy options (Molla, 2014). The knowledge aid package includes policy research working papers, technical and discussion papers, sector reviews, annual publications and ‘learning events’ such as regional and national thematic conferences, workshops, expert meetings, and intensive courses.

In March 2014, the World Bank approved a flagship project intended to benefit many SSA countries. The Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence Project (ACE) (2014–2018) finances 19 university-based centres of excellence in West and Central Africa. The governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Togo and The Gambia receive loans and grants to finance advanced specialised studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-related disciplines, as well as in agriculture and health. As the Project Appraisal document shows, the World Bank covers US$150 million of the total cost of over US$290 million (World Bank, 2014b). The ACE project highlights the role of research in providing African nations with ‘knowledge solutions to enhance development’ (World Bank, 2014b: 34).

Key rationales for the project were: (a) a specialised skills shortage; and (b) low research output (Blom, 2012; World Bank, 2014b, 2014d). The Bank noted that African countries have very low researcher-to-population ratios and low research productivity. Drawing on university rankings data, a measurement regime that has emerged with the dominance of knowledge economy discourse (Hazelkorn, 2009), the World Bank pointed to the absence of any university from SSA, other than South African universities, in the top 400 world universities. In the Bank’s assessment, this problem is linked to the shortage of qualified researchers and research trainers in most African universities, where doctorate degree holders are estimated to be less than 20% of the total academic staff (World Bank, 2014b: 4).

The stated objective of the project is strengthening the capacities of African universities to deliver high quality and relevant applied research and research education to support the development needs of the region. The project’s innovative aspect is that it aims to produce competent research graduates within Africa and thereby reduce the problem of brain-drain in the region (World Bank, 2014b). The project aims at generating ‘high quality professionals with higher order skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and research capacity, especially within [scientific and technical] S&T fields’ (World Bank, 2014b: 2). This focus is partly reflected in the weightings of the three categories of investment in the project: education for the knowledge economy (75%), health system performance (15%) and technology diffusion (10%) (World Bank, 2014b). Most importantly, the project targets mainly Masters- and PhD-level training. The doctorate is recognised as being essential to the knowledge production process and knowledge-economy capability building. As such it has a prominent, if not central, position in HE policy informed by knowledge economy imperatives as are emerging in many African nations. The Bank’s Implementation Status and Result Report shows that within a year since the enactment of the project, the centres enrolled 3510 students, mainly in Master and PhD programmes (World Bank, 2015b).

In May 2016, the World Bank approved ACE II for Eastern and Southern part of Africa. The five-year project costs 148 million USD; and focuses on regional priority areas. The Centers will be hosted in 16 universities located in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Against the backdrop of the Bank’s strategy for Africa, that is, strengthening “competitiveness and employment through the production of quality high-skilled human resources in priority growth sectors” (World Bank, 2016: 10), the project is seen as an instrument to boost human capital of the participating countries.

In pressing African governments to reform their HE sectors, the World Bank highlights Asian examples to underscore the importance of the knowledge economy for economic growth and poverty reduction. The Bank stresses that:

Part of the driving force of the East-Asian economic miracle was a dramatic build-up of a technical and technological workforce prepared by an ever improving education and applied research system, in close coordination with well thought-out national and sector policies. These are also capacities which SSA requires for sustaining and further accelerating economic growth (World Bank, 2014b: 2, emphasis added).

In the early 1960s, the Republic of Korea and Ghana had comparable per capita income. Today the two nations are positioned in an opposite end of the economic development continuum. Economists within and outside the World Bank attribute the two countries’ divergent development trajectories to differences in knowledge accumulation and translation through increased expenditure on education, research and innovation (see Figure 1). More specifically, the World Bank (2002) maintains, ‘Divergent evolutionary paths in tertiary education policies and practices may have contributed to the growing difference in total factor productivity (TFP) between Ghana and the Republic of Korea’ (World Bank, 2002: 12). Mahbub Ul Haq, renowned economist and leading proponent of the human development paradigm, concurs that economic transformation of the Republic of Korea has largely to do with massive investment in people and technology. Underscoring the value of investment in human capital, Ul Haq (1995) notes, ‘it is difficult to understand how Japan and the Republic of Korea could emerge as the most efficient exporters of steel and steel products, without possessing any iron ore or coal—except in terms of their human productivity’ (Ul Haq, 1995: 19).

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Figure 1.

Knowledge makes the difference between poverty and wealth: GDP per capita growth in Republic of Korea and Ghana over 40 years.

Nevertheless, there is no consensus on what causes the divergences in the developmental trajectories of the two nations. For example, for economic historian Samuel Huntington the divergent developmental paths between Ghana and the Republic of Korea are attributable to cultural differences in general. Perhaps with a reductionist tone, he argues ‘South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organisation, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count’ (Huntington, 2000: xiii).

The World Bank sees the development of human capital as a key element of what it refers to as the ‘four interactive pillars of the knowledge economy’. The Bank holds that ‘a society must have a minimum level of human capital before it can develop an efficient research and innovation system or reap productivity gains from investments in an up-to-date information technology infrastructure’ (World Bank, 2007: 25). At other times the World Bank appears rather to focus on tapping into the global stock of knowledge and adapting it to a local use (World Bank, 2009). It is not always clear whether or not the Bank is committed to seeing African governments strongly support intensification of research activities. In fact, even to tap into the global knowledge base, countries in the region need to develop their own human capital.

Problematising the issue framing

Policy-issue framing is as much an act of excluding other concerns as a way of defining an agenda to be addressed. The way a problem is represented reflects power relations, which are the function of the economic, political and knowledge resources of the agents involved in a policy process. In the current HE revitalisation movement in Africa, issue framing involves a multi-actor interaction and negotiation in a multi-scalar policy space involving global aid and development agencies as well as continental and regional policy makers. In any policy field, those with the power to set the agenda can also determine the rules of the game, and how and when proposed policy changes are communicated. The political perspective is instrumental in examining donor–recipient relations as a form of strategic position-taking, in which aid providers and recipient governments constantly negotiate policy options and funding priorities within the limits of their relational positions and resources. In effect, policy priorities and reform agendas reflect interests and priorities of key agents in the ‘aid field’.

In the HE development initiatives summarised above, it is evident that there is a heightened attention to the role of knowledge in Africa’s development future, that HE now occupies a central position in economic growth and poverty-reduction agendas in the region, and that emphasis has rightly been placed on the quantity and quality of research and research training in the region. However, we argue that in order to evaluate the validity of the premises and deliverability of the promises of these initiatives, attention needs to be given to the socio-economic and political forces that have given rise to the re-imagining of Africa as a knowledge economy. We argue that a set of interactive historical, political and economic factors, and the relative power and influence that underpin these, mediate the policy discourse. A political economy perspective on the analysis of HE development in Africa highlights the role of donors as policy actors, and the relative importance of national political will in translating global agendas into local realities. The focus should be on the framers and implementers of the reform agendas, which is closely linked to the phenomenon of globalisation that has redefined the boundaries and scale of public policy domains. With the increased flow of ideas and knowledge from the global field of power into national political arenas, policy making has emerged as a transnational business (Beck, 2005) or, as Stavros Moutisios expresses it, ‘the globalization of the economy is accompanied by the globalization of policy making’ (Moutisios, 2009: 479). Globalisation has led to the increasing influence of international organisations (e.g. the World Bank, OECD, UNESCO and other UN agencies) in national and regional policy processes (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). They facilitate the convergence of policies and practices through knowledge sharing and by setting standards and strategies to deal with the perils and opportunities of ongoing economic and political integration and interdependence.

In African HE, at least in principle, partnership is a predominant model of interaction between national governments and external development partners. The spirit of partnership in a policy reform process implies that, within a mutually agreed framework, all parties have real influence as well as responsibilities. The assumption is that globally-structured education agendas come into effect only through local mediation and re-articulation (Dale and Robertson, 2012). This in turn implies the importance of analysing the role of the local context, including historical legacies, in translating globally/regionally-initiated HE reform agendas. Hence, it is critical to examine whether or not the policy processes have been participatory in the sense that key local stakeholders have not been excluded from the dialogue. Local stakeholders are more likely to commit to a policy agenda that reflects their needs and aspirations. However, in reality, leading educational donors such as the World Bank have the ‘symbolic capital’ (i.e. legitimacy and recognition that stem from their economic resources and knowledge of the field) (Bourdieu, 1991) to exert immense pressure on national policy actors to endorse globally structured agendas or actively align their policy choices with the policy preferences on offer (Molla, 2013). As such, beyond the formal statements of partnership, agents in the aid field do not have equal power to decide what ‘can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority’ (Ball, 1990: 17). Hence it is worth problematising who is in a position to frame policy problems and devise instruments, and whose knowledge counts as valuable in the policy process.

Three out of the four HE development initiatives reviewed above have been initiated or actively supported by the World Bank. Although the Bank expresses strong commitment for continuing partnership with African governments in supporting HE, the current policy moment has rarely been informed by lessons from past experiences. There is a clear reluctance from the Bank’s side to acknowledge how its past policies and rigid position contributed to the decline of African HE. In addition to countless empirical studies (e.g. Klees, 2010; Molla, 2014; Samoff and Carrol, 2004), a thorough investigation (commissioned by the World Bank and UNESCO) showed that the push towards reallocating public funds from HE to basic education effectively stunted development of HE in the region from the 1970s to the 1990s (TFHES, 2000). For the Bank, those assertions are simply ‘perceptions’ (World Bank, 2002) although it acknowledges that there were ‘decades of limited engagement’ with African HE (Diop, 2014). The lack of an honest and genuine evaluation by the World Bank of the impact of its past actions in the region undermines confidence in current initiatives.

In all its multiple identities – as a bank, a development agency and a development research institute (Harrison, 2004) – the World Bank influences education policy processes in different forms: through funding projects and the provision of knowledge-based services, including policy consultancy and sector reviews. As a bank, it is concerned with recovering its loans, and holds poor countries to the obligation of debt service. Its policy agendas are biased toward economic issues, mainly human capital building and neoliberal accountability of educational outcomes. Focusing on the Bank’s Education Strategy 2020 document (World Bank, 2011), keywords related to social equality (equality, discrimination, human rights, public good and social return) appeared 19 times while words related to human capital (human capital, economic development, productivity, efficiency and economic growth) and neoliberalism (private sector, decentralisation, market, fee and competition) appeared 44 and 65 times, respectively (Joshi and Smith, 2012: 190). Furthermore, from their analysis of the language of the World Bank reports from 1946 to 2012, Moretti and Pestre (2015: 23) conclude that, although the policy narrative adapts to changing environments (i.e. perceived or real development needs of developing countries), the Bank often frames its reports and texts in words that are ‘extremely uplifting – and just as unfocused: because the function of gerunds [such as fostering, boosting, bridging and levelling] consists in leaving an action’s completion undefined, thus depriving it of any definite contour’. This linguistic practice in turn makes it challenging, if not impossible, to discern the Bank’s undelivered promises in its HE projects in Africa.

The HE development initiatives outlined above also seem to be underpinned by a problematic assumption about the indispensability of HE for Africa’s socio-economic transformation. Given that 60% of Africa’s population is below the age of 35 (World Bank, 2014b), strategic investment in the knowledge and skills of this generation is indeed crucial. However, the role of knowledge as an economic resource is being imagined in largely agrarian societies in which innovation capability and the advanced ICT required for a knowledge-driven economy are still lacking. For most African states the economic transition being imagined is not that from advanced industrial or even post-industrial economies to knowledge-based economies, but from agrarian economies with low levels of industrial development. Consequently, as documented above, the region has the lowest global level of knowledge production, dissemination and usage capacity as measured by its share of research and development expenditure, scientific publication and patent applications; and there are striking gaps in research capacities between countries (see Table 1 in Molla and Cuthbert (2016)). A holistic regional knowledge economy agenda is problematic since not all countries in the region are equally positioned to realise a knowledge-driven economic system. Among other things, the prolonged intentional neglect and the strong pro-market policy pressure from donors have had differentiated effects across different HE systems. Some SSA countries, like South Africa, have relatively well-developed knowledge-intensive industries and a reasonably substantial budget allocation for research and development. Many others, like Ethiopia and Ghana, still mostly depend on subsistent agriculture and resources extraction, and invest little in research and innovation. In fact, as we have shown elsewhere (Molla and Cuthbert, 2016), countries such as Ethiopia focus on facilitating technological transfer rather than knowledge production and technological innovation (FDRE, 2010). This is a misguided policy direction because basic research is critical for discoveries and innovation. Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail rightly argues that although in the short-term knowledge production may not be profitable, in the long run ‘curiosity pays’; and, importantly, fundamental research ‘is a force that enriches the culture of any society with reason and basic truth’ (Zewail, 2010: 347).

Aspiration for knowledge-driven economic growth is essential for Africa; however, the policy strategy to realise the aspiration necessitates context-sensitive policies and strategies. Needless to say, HE systems in Africa have emerged from different historical and political settings and operate in diverse national contexts; and development needs and priorities of national governments in the region differ considerably. Despite this reality, the regional HE development agendas summarised above seem to be envisioned in isolation from the national and institutional contexts, whereas in practice policy reforms are made in distinct institutional arenas shaped by national specificities. For example, even though governments in SSA have agreed to boost their investment in research and development (UNECA, 2008), many countries in the region have no strong national research system that comprises actors within and outside the university sector (Atuahene, 2011; Cloete and Maassen, 2015). Many countries in SSA do not have comparable research capacities (see Molla and Cuthbert, 2016). Relatedly, as Knorr Cetina suggests, the transition towards the knowledge economy ‘involves more than the presence of more experts, more technological gadgets, more specialist rather than participant interpretations. It involves the presence of knowledge processes themselves… it involves the presence of epistemic practice’ (Knorr Cetina, 2001: 177). That is, knowledge production and application necessitates a functional epistemic community and epistemic practices that, in turn, requires economic resources and political freedom. In the African context, these two conditions are not readily available. National political commitment is a key variable in creating an effective scientific infrastructure that can support a knowledge-driven economic system.

Not only does the knowledge economy agenda lack proper national and institutional contextualisation, but also underplays the non-economic values of HE. It has little or no room for harmonising the economic and social benefits of the sector. The focus is on scientific knowledge and the entrepreneurial skills required for technological innovation and economic productivity. Seldom are issues of social transformation, cultural promotion and political emancipation centrally positioned in HE mission statements in the region. By narrowly focusing on the economic values of HE, the initiatives seem to fail to imagine a ‘developmental university’ that produces ‘knowledge-in-the-world’ and ‘knowledge-for-the-world’ (Barnett, 2011: 31) in response to critical societal challenges and aspirations. Externally initiated HE development agendas in Africa are also characterised by issue omissions. For instance, the possibility of promoting scientific inquiry outside the university system (including independent research centres and networks of professional think tanks) and mechanisms for translating university research into innovation are missing in the policy discourses.

Another equally critical issue is that the capacity of the private sector to invest in HE and research and development as well as to absorb graduates through generating the appropriate range of high-skilled jobs is still limited, and varies significantly across the region. For instance, graduate unemployment is a pressing challenge in SSA (Mohamedbhai, 2015). In countries such as Ethiopia, graduates enter the labour market with little or no confidence in their employability, which has largely to do with the relevance of their learning experiences, including curricular materials and pedagogic practices. Without first ensuring quality and relevance at national level, there is little hope of improving the standard of HE in Africa through regional harmonisation and tuning.

Finally, we concur with Cloete et al. (2015) that the ineffectiveness of educational development initiatives in Africa has largely to do with a lack of in-depth understanding of the problem to be addressed and contextual factors mediating policy actions and inactions. The pervasiveness of imported expertise in Africa’s HE policy field means that vital local voices and knowledge are marginalised, resulting in superficial framings, issue omissions and poor implementation. As Cloete et al. have succinctly stated:

Africa is littered with anecdotal studies, followed by high-profile conferences with grand declarations and recommendations…. The lack of implemented reform in Africa is often lamented as a problem not of good policy but of poor implementation, which is then attributed to a lack of capacity or funds. However, the difficulty actually originates with superficial understandings of the problem, followed by declarations rather than policy, as well as a lack of consensus on what to do. All of this gives rise to inevitable disappointment (Cloete et al., 2015: 10).

In fact, against the backdrop of the World Bank’s position as a global neoliberal agent (Escobar, 1995; Klees, 2010), one might even reasonably question what the Bank really aims to achieve with its development aid in Africa. Critics dispute that development strategies of the World Bank mask the hidden agenda of opening up investment and trade opportunities for transnational corporations of leading capitalist countries such as the USA, which has more voting power to influence decisions and agendas of the Bank than all SSA countries combined (Stein, 2008). The Bank’s focus of development aid supports this claim – through financing the development of transportation and telecommunications, pressing borrowing countries to deregulate their economic systems and opposing minimum wage laws, and insisting on production for export, which chiefly benefits the corporations that control international trade, the World Bank ensures its commitment to globalising neoliberalism (Harrison, 2004; Ilon, 2002). According to Harrison, the close association of the World Bank with the globalisation of market capitalism can also be explained by its commitment ‘to stop all lending to any member state that violates the property rights of a transnational corporation’ (Harrison, 2004: 9).

Conclusions

This paper reviews recent global and regional initiatives to revitalise African HE. A key discursive construct that dominates the four HE policy statements examined above is the knowledge economy. What is evident in the discursive framing is that the transition from agrarian to knowledge economies is uncritically assumed, without due recognition that the move to knowledge-based economies in advanced economies has occurred from a base of advanced industrialisation and the kind of infrastructure that this entails, especially ICT. This assumption should be problematised, both empirically and theoretically. What is being hoped for in much of Africa is a capacity to transition to a knowledge economy from a base-line that in many countries is pre-industrial (subsistence agriculture, for example) or constituted of primary and secondary industries that employ variable levels of industrial processes and expertise. As we await the outcomes of Africa’s knowledge economy aspirations, to which the HE initiatives outlined in this paper may contribute, there may be a need for some re-consideration of the usefulness of traditional categorisation of economic activities – ‘primary industries’ (e.g. agriculture, forestry, mining and fishery), ‘secondary industries’ (e.g. manufacturing) and ‘tertiary industries’ (e.g. HE and other knowledge economy sectors) – and their sequencing in economic development.

Despite strong pressures for cross-national policy convergence, externally-structured agendas are rarely translated as intended. The realisation of regionally- or globally-initiated development programmes largely depends on the understanding and consensus of local agents (including non-state actors such as think tanks, professional networks, philanthropic agencies and the independent media) that are better positioned to recognise windows of opportunity for policy reforms and implementation than are outsiders such as donor representatives. Eventually policy actions and inactions occur through local institutions and structures within a specific historical context. As Skogsta notes, ‘Established ideas and interests privileged by existing domestic institutions and the drag of policy legacies are likely to act as bulwarks against the reformist or convergent impulses of globalizing forces’ (Skogsta, 2000: 818). The implication for those involved in the HE revitalisation movement in Africa is that it is important to build real partnerships for ownership of agendas and change, and to democratise national policy fields. HE development initiatives devoid of the active participation of local stakeholders are more likely to reinforce undemocratic policy processes, and thereby jeopardise successful implementation of proposed projects and plans.

Future research on the impact of globally/regionally-initiated HE development projects and programmes in Africa may benefit from a political economy analytical framework. Such a framework is instrumental in closely examining interests and priorities of key agents (e.g. the World Bank, AfDB and AU); structures (i.e. contextual factors including historical legacies of prolonged negligence and the prevalence of the knowledge economy discourse); and the rules of the game that govern the interactions between and among key stakeholders (e.g. partnership and aid agreements). It is worth asking whether or not the assumed homogeneity in the regional HE development initiatives risks minimising the specific cultural and historical characteristics of different HE systems in SSA to the extent that the realisation of goals is compromised.