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Years of structural adjustment policies led to long-term disinvestment in Africa’s higher education systems. Public institutions across the continent continue to deal with the consequences, from deteriorating student housing to outdated labs. Rensburg shares his perspective on why repairing this foundation is essential for enabling learning and innovation required for inclusive development.
An absolutely important role, both as universities and their own narrow role. If I could put it that way, of providing high level skills to very high level skills, for both the public and private sectors. And on the other hand, of course, research and innovation, to contribute to, to powering up the economies. So, so in that narrow role, yes, we have to do far better than we are.
And I'll come back to that in a moment. There's, of course, the broader role that universities also are expected to play in the innovation space and in the space of achieving social and economic and cultural impact. And that role, traverses as I, as, I guess as, as we know it traverses the narrow role but also the grander role of being able to connect stakeholders, key ones in the policy space.
In government, in, the private sector, connecting them and catalyzing them through the intellectual work, the public scholarship, catalyzing and connecting, these important role players and stakeholders, to the role that they expected to play by providing evidence, by providing them with perhaps reflections or reflective pieces, thought pieces, policy advisory roles in respect of these enormous opportunities.
And, on the other hand, the enormous risks that we currently face and that will accelerate in the period ahead. So turning back to universities now, in terms of their traditional role, African universities have had a rather choppy. If you like, trajectory from, let's call it the late 70s into ten years ago, more or less where there was this policy advice from, in particular, the World Bank and the IMF, because of the power of the influence, when African nation states and governments with the weakest unable to finance public sector services went cap in hand to World Bank, IMF to bail them out, the world Bank put together structural adjustment programs, the consequence of which was
to coerce these governments East, West and southern Africa, with the exception of South Africa still under portrait at the time, so enormous coercion placed on those governments to exit investments in university education and to focus the limited public funds on school education. And so technical vocational education, college and university education. Disinvestment occurred over almost a 20 to 25 year period, and that had an enormous impact on the infrastructure capacity of our institutions, public institutions, particularly across the continent, particularly East, West and southern Africa.
And so we've had and we continue to have a massive backlog in terms of the ordinary, simple thing of having in good condition student accommodation that's not in good condition. If we were to use a five star rating, I would say across the continent we're looking at a two star rating for our student accommodations. And so there's a lot of work still to do.
And bear in mind that the leaders of the future that we are putting up in such poor conditions. And then, of course, our labs, and our infrastructure [are] so essential for offering modern learning. If I think of online learning, which we all recognize provides an enormous opportunity for African universities to scale up, consider, as you and its own transition from a traditional university under Michael Crow, evolving into an institution with, what, 50 60,000 in traditional offerings and 8000 thousand in online offerings.
And so we see that as a great possibility. Yet we still have those backlogs. And in particular, if I think aloud then about, the challenge of broadband, capability, of fiber, access to fiber, to scale up this, possibility of firstly to catalyze and scale up this, the possibility of online learning and, and teaching.
And so [a] great opportunity. But it does mean that we have to pull ourselves up [by] our bootstraps. And in that context, I think that institutions such as an issue can play an important role of demonstrating what is possible. And so I do think conversations and dialogs with these key public institutions and their leaders and the leadership teams, would be critical and important with the idea of being actually some of us who've been there.
Right. We know the journey. We don't know your journey, but we can help you reflect by looking at our journeys. And in this way, we hope to be able to offer you some insight that you might be able to seize upon. As you take on this enormous responsibility of scaling up, over the, over the next 2 to 3 decades.
And scaling up begins by catalyzing the idea, germinating and then catalyzing the idea of being able to grow, in strength. Our traditional program offerings and then beginning to initiate and growing strength over the next decade, perhaps in three horizons of 4 or 5 years each growing ourselves out of where we find ourselves now and into a new possibility, where we are seen as African universities, as actually stepping up, and stepping into, this enormous challenge of providing, education for young people.