Leadership and Management: Case Studies in Training in Higher Education in Africa

26/10/2015

Leadership & Management: Case Studies in Training in Higher Education in Africa Johann Mouton and Lauren Wildschut, editors

This volume on leadership and management development for higher education in African universities is a foundation for all further inquiry on how to achieve the most effective training techniques and programs that will provide effective leadership and managerial capacity in a rapidly expanding tertiary education environment.

The African Minds publication containing case studies on Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana presents a comprehensive historical summary of the growth of programs for training university level administrators and staff. It is background providing awareness of Africa’s shift in the past quarter century from an educational focus on primary and secondary education to the expansive growth of tertiary education. By profiling training in Anglophone universities and describing earlier training efforts in South Africa, the authors create a context illustrating the scope of need in university operations for improving governance, budgeting, strategic planning, quality assurance, leadership behavior and institutional transformation.

These topics are central to the work of the Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM) project as it emphasizes clarification of needs assessment, training of target groups, design of training modules and development of modes of delivery of training. The HELM project was implemented in three countries, each of which was subject of a case study. The operational phases were sequential in delivery beginning in Tanzania. This permitted course corrections in the Ugandan and Ghanaian efforts and consequent improvement in the quality of the exercises.

Each case study concludes with commentary on the impact of the training. This is one of the less satisfying aspects of the report as it relies on self-reported commentary by participants. These are positive anecdotes but they do not capture what the impact may have been on the three institutions participating in the HELM training. It would have been useful to have pre and post training exercises by the participants to provide data on how individuals benefited from the training.

Additionally, it would have been valuable to have brief descriptions of campus cultures during the training periods to indicate the readiness and responsiveness of universities in the three countries for implementation of a focused training culture in campus operations. As an example the University of Ghana conducted the training during a period of significant institutional reform which included redesign of undergraduate learning, restructuring of all academic programs into four colleges to support enhanced research agendas and reform of the promotion and tenure process to emphasize greater clarity, transparency and fairness.

Much more positively, the depth of analysis of the three HELM case studies offers important detail on the technical considerations required in the design of effective training programs. One of the two chapters in this final section of the book describes the attention given to the development of evaluation formats using logic models, formative assessment and assurance that training is aligned with needs assessment. These detailed checklists for review and monitoring training are fundamental to success of future HELM programs.

The final chapter offers insights into knowledge transfer and defines the next development task for training programs. More robust models need to include evidence of how the sequence for knowledge sharing and potential for future knowledge can be subjected to verifiable measurements of knowledge exchange among all parties. This will require the design of a means for calculating and scoring outcomes to determine what elements of the training have the greatest impact on enhancing leadership potential and management skills. Finally, such a scoring methodology could then be aligned with the two basic criteria guiding so much of resource allocation: evidence of institutional strengthening and human development.

What is abundantly clear is that the HELM model needs to be continually replicated in other tertiary settings as further refinements in the training process produce outcomes make African universities more effectively led and managed.

26/08/2015

This is a very good reading and reference material. Kudos to Carnegie for initiating these case studies in Africa.

I am adding my voice to three sub-themes of the report and to shed light on what has been initiated at the Association of African Universities.

1. Strategic Plans It is quite remarkable that of late many African universities are developing their institutional Strategic Plans. However, this is still need to guide many higher education institutions in developing yearly operational plans out of their Strategic Plans.

In 2010, the AAU and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), through funding from the Canadian Government, developed a successful three-year project on Strengthening Higher Education Stakeholders Relations in Africa that saw Canadian universities helping their African counterparts to strengthen their Strategic Plan to make it more inclusive of and responsive to external stakeholders’ demands. This project was a huge success, and universities under the project have seen and are reaping the benefits of university-industry linkages.

2. Employability of university graduates Universities should make it mandatory for graduates to undergo some kind of internship, whether with industry or through community engagement to build their soft and other employable skills before they graduate from their institutions. In the most recent AAU LEDEV workshop held in Gaborone in August 2015, some good practices were cited for sharing. At the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) in Nigeria, every student gets training in some theoretical and hands-on training before graduation, and some get employed in disciplines they don’t even study in school.

With regards to linkages between universities and the private sector, more often African universities look up to the few high-tech industries on the continent for partnerships. However, some of these industries may be unaware of the potentials of HEI research outputs. Universities are therefore not marketing themselves well. Meanwhile, the informal sector, comprises mostly small and medium scale enterprises are those that need the managerial and technical expertise from the university outputs. Yet, many universities overlook this very vibrant but hugely under-resourced sub-sector for collaboration.

In another recent AAU survey on Graduate Employability, it was pointed out that to promote graduate employability, a vibrant career services unit established by universities is vital to provide the foundation for the life-long self and career management of the student. Additionally, HEIs should endeavour to run dedicated and regularly updated careers services webpages providing services and giving information on resume building, interview preparations, job search assistance, work placement and internship, on-campus recruitment fairs, etc.

3. LEDEV – leadership development workshops While the AAU LEDEV workshop series are not tailor-made solutions to the many challenges confronting higher education in Africa, the modules help participants to appreciate the environment in which they are operating; use resources at their disposal for the achievement of organizational goals; and provide a better understanding of being a university manager within the changing context of higher education.

In view of the popularity and high demand for LEDEV, the AAU has decided to run an offshoot of the series called LEDEV Plus (LEDEV +). This will follow the same pattern as the current LEDEV but will focus on not more than two themes per workshop over 5 working days. This will allow for more participant interaction among themselves and with resource persons. Under LEDEV Plus, institutions can request the AAU for in-service training of their staff on specific themes. Professionals like Account Officers, Librarians, University Administrators, ICT Officers, and International Liaison Officers would have focused training in their respective fields.