Letters

LETTERS: Varsities must prioritise research opportunities

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A past graduation ceremony in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | NMG

According to a new report by the Auditor-General, several public universities in Kenya are broke and in a deep financial crisis that could soon grind them to a halt, following dwindling revenues.

The poor state of the university’s finances was first made public in January last year in yet another report by the Auditor-General submitted to Parliament showing that one of the leading public university was, at the time of the audit, unable to remit Sh673.6 million in statutory deductions from staff salaries.

The situation has been precipitated by the continuous decline in the budgetary allocation by the government and further worsened by lack of students for the module two programmes, popularly known as parallel courses, which formed the bedrock of many of these institutions’ revenues.

This is after the university cut-off points were lowered to C+, offering a window of opportunity for all the form four leavers who scored above the minimum university entry grade to proceed to university under government sponsorship.

The result of this mix of events has been a downsizing of campuses, disposing of assets, laying off staff, deterioration of services amid recurrent industrial action by lecturers and workers holding their cash-strapped employers by the neck.

The universities which had borrowed billions of shillings to finance expansion hoping to cash in on a demand for higher education in the last two decades have found it hard to adjust to strict reforms by the government introduced in 2016.

Public universities in Kenya are too dependent on government funding and tuition fees from students.

Over time, the government funding to public universities has gradually decreased due to the growing government expenditure items but this has not been substituted by substantial revenue increase from student tuition fees or earnings from commercialisation of research output.

Faced with donor fatigue and declining public funding, universities in Kenya should search for new models of financing specific initiatives such as hubs for research and innovation as adopted by world-class universities in South Africa, Europe and North America.

In recent years, most universities in Kenya have been trying hard to assert themselves by creating elitist academic visibility and laying claim to being world-class universities, a status that many of them just seem to have in name only with nothing to show in form of research grants.

Following guidelines set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on identification of world-class universities, most flag-staff universities in Kenya were found to be weak in key areas that included publication in peer-reviewed journals, knowledge production in form of doctoral graduates, graduation rates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and enrolment mix between undergraduate and postgraduate students.

It is unfortunate that many Kenyan universities are advertising themselves as world-class, merely by signing memorandums of understanding with equally low-grade universities in other parts of the world.

Going forward, Kenyan universities need to deliberately promote and advance the research function in the universities through interaction with businesses, industry experts, government entities, and the broader community across multiple boundaries.

This will position research as the alternative source of funding.

Dominic Nzuki, strategy consultant, Altima Africa Limited.