The past 18 months have been turbulent for many universities across the African continent. From Cape Town to Ibadan to Nairobi, campuses have become sites of protest and debate about fees, equal access to education, the colonial character of curriculums, social inequality, and many other issues.
Under the spotlight has been the question of how to make education accessible to millions of young students, in a continent with the fastest growing youth population in the world. At the same time, Africa's universities and research institutes are mandated to produce independent, socially relevant research within a global higher education sector increasingly shaped by privatisation, competition, the commercialisation of research and academic job insecurity. The question of how to ensure student access to education and invest in research, against a backdrop of economic stagnation, rising living costs, and the threat of global recession, is a vexed one.
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