Background
Higher education institutes (HEI) play an important role of drivers of sustainable development in Ethiopia not only by supplying the skilled workforce, but also by producing knowledge, technology, and innovations that can address societal challenges and accelerate the national development trajectory of the country. Over the last three decades the landscape of HEIs in Ethiopia has considerably changed due to an ever-increasing demand for more quality education and research, highlighting the pressing need for PhD holders. While the higher education sector needs 30% of their staff to be a PhD holder, only 13% of those who currently teach at Ethiopian universities completed a PhD. To overcome this increasing demand of PhD holders in Ethiopia, the Ministry of Education has come up with the Home-Grown Collaborative PhD Programs Initiative. Through this initiative the ministry wants to mobilize first-generation universities (e.g. Addis Ababa University, Arba Minch University, Bahir Dar University, Gondar University, Haramaya University, Hawassa University, Jimma University and Mekele University) to produce 5,000 PhD graduates in the identified 67 PhD programs by 2025. Despite the significant investments by the MoE, current PhD trajectories are often delayed or not completed.
Challenges
Generally the followings are the main challenges that are exhibited and motivated the project. These have been identified as key causes of a low or delayed PhD completion rate.
- Absence of funding: The government is providing limited funding (60,000 BIRR or 1,090 EURO) to support the candidates in their research. This is clearly too little, and forces PhD candidates and their supervisors to seek other already scarce funds, which further delays the trajectory or in worst case forces the candidate to abandon the program.
- Inadequate supervision: There is a scarcity in local supervisors, and too often those available lack the required skills, time, or incentives to guide their students. The scarcity in local supervisors can be largely explained by the stringent profile requirements in the PhD policy documents (assistant professors only can be supervisor), the poor overlap in the expertise of the supervisor and the research area chosen by the candidate and the absence of (monetary) incentives by the HEIs to for supervisors.
- Inadequate delivery of courses: PhD programs are currently poorly organized and managed, and lack a strong monitoring and evaluation system leading to poor student follow up, lack of corrective actions leading to unnecessary delays in study completion. These delays are worsened by a shortness of staff that can teach (often compulsory) PhD courses and a shared agreement on the required set of competences for a PhD.
- To access to laboratory/equipment/reagents: Too often the poor research skills and the limited access to laboratory facilities or reagents further delay the research work.
Vision
IQ-GEAR is an international interuniversity collaboration between Flemish and Ethiopian universities with the vision to transform both postgraduate education and research quality in the domains of infectious diseases and nutrition, and to become the driver of sustainable and equitable development in Ethiopia.
Milestones
To realize this, we have identified four milestones, including
- The involved universities deliver higher quality and inclusive postgraduate education benefiting the PhD programs.
- Improved research practices, and both interuniversity and interdisciplinary research collaborations on infectious diseases and nutrition that lead to high quality needs-oriented research with high societal uptake.
- Improved ICT and Library services that enhance the delivery of postgraduate education and interuniversity research collaborations.
- Improved engagement of stakeholders that enhance the delivery of postgraduate education, and both interuniversity and interdisciplinary research collaborations.