Read the interview:
Philip Cotton outlines urgent challenges facing higher education across Africa, including low enrollment rates, inequitable access, and misaligned academic programs. He calls for a shift away from rote learning and toward transformative, future-ready education. Cotton emphasizes the need to match degree offerings to long-term societal needs and to rethink teaching, assessment, and opportunity design to truly support Africa’s growing youth population. Without systemic reform, he warns, universities risk reinforcing inequality rather than reducing it.
We've got what's often called the demographic dividend. This huge number of young people, the largest collection of young people on any continent in the world. Um, and yet there is a constant move towards employment to livelihoods to people being able to support their communities and their loved ones. And so there is that that there's a there's a deficit in terms of jobs and opportunities for people. And I think there's a lack of focus on employability as well as as one of the issues and that that connects with that. I I think there are other issues and those are about you know constant comparison with the rest of the world. So if we compare with the rest of the world we would expect 40% of our young people to be in higher education. In many parts of Africa it's somewhere between 3 and 9%. Is that a problem? Well, I'm not sure it is a problem because one of the things we do have to do is stop comparing ourselves way way beyond the continent. I guess that the state of higher education in Africa in many ways um reflects what's going on in higher education in other parts of the world. You know, admission to higher education, the problems that young people encounter getting admitted to the best institutions. some of the misdeeds and misdealings that happen in that period of taking your final exit school exams and entering university. The misdeeds that go on during progress at university, the the challenges, the exams that people have to sit that lack validity, reliability, credibility, that are unfair and unjust, where we haven't thought through what we examine, why we examine, and when we examine it, and what we examine it for. all those things determining the progress of students. And so without fair, valid, reliable systems, it's very difficult to know that what you're doing is is an honest endeavor. I think access to scholarships is another issue. Access to degrees that make a difference. You know, universities are places of transformation or should be by and large. So, how do we measure whether we're truly transforming young people's lives, or are we simply protecting them for 3 or 4 years from the vagaries of life and you know the need to get an income and bring money into the family. But during that time, we have an awesome responsibility to provide opportunities, and the possibility of opportunities, for them to develop. I think there are a lot of degrees that have very little value. We haven't matched the degrees, even the names of the degrees and the titles of the degrees with the needs of the community. And it's it's not the needs now, it's the needs 20 years from now. How are we future-proofing those young people? How are we setting them up to contribute to the continent? So the way in which they learn, largely by wrote, the way in which they're examined, largely by regurgitation, is is alive and well. All those things happen. And yet we need to do things radically different. So, I don't want to paint too gloomy a picture, but it's apparent that there are problems and there are issues that need to be fixed. And the longer we go about fixing them, or getting our head around those problems, the more young people come into the system and become victims of a failing and failed system.