Perspective Chapter: African Higher Education Centers of Excellence – A Critical Reflection

Abstract

There are different types of CoEs based on regional, national, and institutional needs, across different disciplines—health sciences, research, leadership, medicine, higher education, etc. Arguably, the conceptualizations of CoEs have been evolving as time goes by. It is imperative to critically examine the nuances of the challenges and opportunities of the African CoEs to enhance their capacity and potential to achieve their vision and mission. Therefore, the paper has twofold objectives: (1) What has been the strategic significances of the African CoEs? and (2) What are the perils of the African CoEs? These critical questions are examined from the perspective of Transformative Learning Theory. Although the strategic significances of the African CoEs included capacity development and academic collaborations and partnership, there have been also such perils as a lack of epistemic congruence within the African indigenous knowledge and skills bases and the compromisation of autonomy and academic freedom of the hosting HEIs of the CoEs.

1. Introduction

Historically, centers of excellence (CoE) originated in the manufacturing sector and were a centralized body to improve operations and output [1]. Later, they were leveraged by information and technology leaders, seeking to facilitate the creation of hubs for knowledge sharing and capacity building [1]. Currently, there are different types of CoEs based on regional, national, and institutional needs, across different disciplines—health sciences, research, leadership, medicine, higher education, etc. Arguably, the conceptualizations of CoEs have been evolving as time goes by.

CoEs could be a network of partners, with a coordinating center, which works together to pursue excellence in a particular area [2]. They could be physical and/or virtual. As partners, they could share infrastructure and bring together academics across different disciplines. The two common pillars of CoEs, therefore, are a concentration of resources, both material and human, in the pursuit of attaining and sustaining world-class performance in their focus areas [3]. The human capital of such centers is unique, as they do have leading-edge knowledge and competency. Hence, CoEs are normally referred to as competency or capability centers.

Globally, interest in excellence has grown exponentially, as public and private institutions shift their attention from meeting targets to achieving excellence. The establishment of African CoEs has emerged as a trend in the African higher education space, spearheaded by different regional and global actors. The Word Bank (WB) and the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) are cases in point. The WB popularly introduced African CoEs in 2014. Presently, the WB has 76 CoEs, in 20 different African countries in the eastern and southern regions. These CoEs are run in collaboration with the governments of the hosting countries. WB’s CoEs have been envisioned to strengthen selected Eastern and Southern African higher education institutions (HEIs) to deliver quality postgraduate education and build collaborative research capacity in the regional priority areas [4]. ARUA and United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), furthermore, have joined-forces and launched 13 African CoEs envisioned to address Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs).

Arguably, the ARUA’s and the WB’s centers of excellence appear focusing to alleviate the pressing challenges the continent is facing in the twenty-first century.

2. Objectives

CoE is typically established to address skills and knowledge deficits within organizations, countries, regions, and the continent at large. The African CoEs are no exception. However, there may be reasons to adopt a critical view on the presumptuous benefits of African CoEs. This is imperative to enhance their capacity and potential to achieve their vision and mission by critically examining the nuances of the challenges and opportunities of the African CoEs.

The overarching objective of this reflective paper, therefore, is to unpack the African higher education CoEs within the sociocultural and politico-economic premises of the African continent. Specifically, the paper has twofold objectives: (1) What have been the strategic significances of the African CoEs? and (2) What are the perils of the African CoEs? These critical questions are examined from the perspective of Transformative Learning Theory.

3. Methodology

The paper primarily used a critical desk review. Hence, scoping reviews of global evidence about CoEs were made using the Google search engine and data were gathered from such sources as PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, and Google Scholar until November 2022. Once retrieved, they were critically reviewed and reflected on, following the objectives of the paper, in the backdrop of the sociocultural and politico-economic of the African continent, guided by Transformative Learning Theory.

4. Transformative learning theory

Worldviews/ frames of references are basic beliefs a person holds about how the world works [5]. They are often acquired uncritically through the socialization and acculturation process, most frequently during significant experiences with teachers, parents, and mentors. Over time, in conjunction with numerous congruent experiences, they become more ingrained in our psyche and support us by providing explanations of the happenings in our daily lives and we become dependent upon them. They act as a sieve through which each new experience is interpreted and given meaning. The new experience is assimilated into these structures if it reinforces the meaning perspective. An incongruent new experience cannot be assimilated. They could be either rejected or the meaning perspective itself is revised and transformed to accommodate the new experience. In nutshell, the revision and transformation of meaning perspectives is the central point of Transformative Learning Theory.

Transformative learning is a desirable process for individuals to learn to think for themselves, through true emancipation from unquestioning acceptance of life experiences, without the active engagement of how we know what we know [6]. Transformative learning occurs when adults engage in activities that allow them to see a different worldview from their own [7]. A perspective transformation leads to “a more fully developed frame of reference which is inclusive, differentiating, permeable, and critically reflective” [6]. Transformative learning is threatening as we experience anxiety and feel threatened when we interrogate assumptions that have been taken for granted for a long in our lives [5].

There are two types of meaning perspective transformations: epochal transformations and incremental transformations [7]. Epochal transformation occurs when meaning perspective change comes quickly. The change is immediately obvious to the learner involved, over perhaps minutes or days. It is a conscious experience of a transformation from one state of not knowing to another state of knowing. A common example would be when someone feels a sense of “Ah Ha!” An incremental transformation, however, is a result of small shifts in meaning schema over time, perhaps over months or years. In this transformation, a learner slowly realizes that his/her meaning perspective has shifted. As a result, there is a kind of retrospective remembering of perspective shift. For instance, remembering the fact that one had a belief that she/he could never finish a university degree successfully. Epochal and incremental transformations assume that there is a conscious appreciation of a shift in meaning perspective in order to be considered transformative.

Furthermore, it describes the transformation of meaning perspectives that occur either in instrumental domain or communicative domain of learning [7]. The former involves cause-effect relationships, problem-solving, and an understanding of how things work. This includes an understanding of the environment (including people), engineering, adult learning and training, trades, management skills, and other technical areas. Transformation in the communicative domain involves the understanding of how people present themselves, and communicate and relate with each other [7] Generally, the communicative domain includes understanding, describing, explaining and reasoning intentions, values, ideals, moral issues, political, philosophical, psychological, and educational concepts and feelings [7]. In the communicative domain, meaning is created through abductive reasoning, which Mezirow describes as the process of using our own experience to understand another’s [7].

4.1 Implication of transformative learning theory to African CoEs

The African CoEs are avenues, where different people with higher expertise and experiences converge, for critical academic debates. Hence, they are supposed to be centers where meaning perspective transformation takes place as they are the melting pots of different worldviews. Individuals involved in the African CoEs are supposed to transform their perspectives, either by revising their worldview or transforming it. Ultimately, individuals could develop worldviews that are inclusive, differentiating, permeable, critically reflective, and integrative of experience [6]. Trafnsformative learning through the CoEs should be done by interrogating all dimensions of the African CoEs. This is a true emancipation for the African people and the continent of Africa. Therefore, we need to engage with African CoEs critically exploring critical topics, overcoming constraints, and expanding the limits of the art of the possible transformative journey. Nevertheless, this should be done within the backdrop of Millennia’s old African indigenous knowledge and skill bases.

5. Strategic significances of the African CoEs

In this reflective paper, the specifics of the general strategic objectives/orientations of African CoEs are considered as significances/opportunities. The African higher CoEs could and should realize human resource development, and improve organizational agility to ultimately positively impact the development of scientific capacity for the creation of new knowledge and innovation to steer socioeconomic development of the continent.

5.1 Capacity development

There has not been a single and simple definition of capacity building. Over the years, however, it has been equated with UNESCO’s conceptualization. Capacity is the [the] ability of individuals, organizations, and systems to perform appropriate functions efficiently, effectively, and sustainably [7, 8]. The International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) [8] divides the capacity building into two: (1) human resource development—providing skills, knowledge, and values to perform effectively, and (2) organizational development—the development of institutional legal frameworks to create and maintain institutional arrangements in a view to enhance the capacities of institutions [9]. In short, capacity includes not only the scientific production capacity of academics but also institutional conditions and capacities, supporting and facilitating these scientific productions.

“Excellence,” was not designated with the habit to do the process rather than the end product [10]. The common characteristics of the CoEs are high research quality and productivity, resource attraction and concentration, international visibility and attractiveness, and organizational robustness and good governance [10]. They are often highly attractive to research and development (R&D) investments and talent in their field [11]. In general, CoEs are believed to bring innovative mechanisms to promote knowledge and scientific advancements [11]. The African CoEs, therefore, are believed to be epicenters for capacity development, which is an important requisite to steer the R&D, of the African country in question. Untimely, this could have a ripple effect as they could be easily emulated by other HEIs.

The human capital in the CoEs possesses very specific and unique skillsets, deep and broad experiences, and does have exudes multidisciplinary capacities. The African CoEs, therefore, are avenues for creating synergic capacities to act on new research problems, expanding the horizon of science. The African CoEs can add value to transform institutions and countries’ economic growth and development. Arguably, the African CoEs have been envisioned to impact socioeconomic development of the African continent positively by supporting and doing scientific prioritization in the science system of the African countries. In other words, African CoEs are believed to be the hub for the development of capacities, for enhancing R&D endeavors, so that commercialization of innovations; development of new technologies; and the improvement of services are possible and could be accelerated.

Therefore, the African CoEs need to be in tune with established practices and embrace the latest trends and emerging thoughts of higher education. Therefore, CoEs need to develop and document templates, blueprints, and repeatable processes and methodologies for all significant work efforts. As a matter of fact, the fundamental principle of the CoE is continuous success and evolution. CoE should establish, define and develop standards and best practices and improve them continually. They strive to surpass ordinary standards and standardize best practices for institution-wide adoption and offer advice on strategic planning, decision-making, and execution.

The African CoEs could permit resource pooling, human resource, in particular, to address critical skills, and applied research needs, which are highly needed across African countries. That is why the WB’s African CoEs have been aiming at. These centers are expected to equip young Africans with new scientific and technical skills, in the areas, where the continent faces a serious shortage of skilled workers in fast-growing sectors, such as science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), extractive industries, agriculture, health, energy, water, infrastructure, environment, agriculture, applied social science, education, and health [4].

Moreover, the ARUA’s CoEs have been in a similar lane as the WB’s. They are believed to be focal points for aggregating world-class researchers from member universities to undertake collaborative research across priority themes—extreme poverty and disease, fragile states and displacement, gender inequalities, and food insecurity. They are also supposed to provide opportunities for graduates from Africa and beyond to work with experienced researchers, forming an assembly point for skilled researchers and students seeking to carry out cutting-edge research.

5.2 Academic collaborations and partnership

CoEs should work with a partnership, which is a leveraging asset. The partnership might include collaboration in the delivery of education programs; faculty development programs; joint conferences, joint research, sharing access to specialized research; learning equipment and library resources (giving students and faculty exposure to different learning environment and equipment), student and faculty exchange, and joint organization of specific courses, for example, at the postgraduate level.

They (CoEs) have been drawing the attention of scientists to enhance collaborations and cultivate access to resources essential for advanced research [12]. Academic partnerships are the lifeblood of CoEs and make them a nodal point that connects various multidisciplinary perspectives the world over. The defining characteristics enable the African CoEs to disseminate discoveries and innovations to the whole of the continent, indeed, beyond.

CoEs have the ability to revitalize the academic system by providing platforms for interdisciplinary, university-industry, and triple-helix relations, promoting bottom-up priority setting among scholars and universities, and attracting talent [13]. Arguably, raising the African CoEs’ teaching, engagement, and research capacity through a partnership with national and international leading institutions within a similar mission could help to build upon the strengths of the partnering institutions. The sharing of unique physical and human resources is vital to create synergies, thereby raise the quality of the impact of the CoEs. African CoEs should continue to revise and update the academic partnership, including consideration of new partners and pushing the frontiers of their mission.

Therefore, the partnership of the African CoEs should be established with national and/or regional industries. CoE-Industry partnerships are important in making the African CoEs relevant by providing improved skills and knowledge, which could address the developmental challenges facing the continent. Extra-mural collaborations play an even greater role in [research] excellence than has been assumed previously [14]. Successful CoEs draw on larger collaborative networks, provide a link between disjointed peers and stakeholders, and work under conditions that reflect multi and transdisciplinary contacts. A scientific sector that operates at the intersection of a diversity of research groups may generate more original research by having a greater variety of perspectives [14]. However, all of the members of the CoE should be self-starters, who are interested in continuous learning and improvement of their skills and expertise.

The African CoEs also benefit from this linkage because university students and academics in them could be exposed to industrial problems, which could be a source for their applied research problem. In other words, this interlinkage could help CoEs to generate funding through fellowships and grants. In general, the partnership between CoEs and industry is a driver for the growth of the science-based industry and industry-based science.

Moreover, CoE-industry relationship could contribute to the understating and advancement of industrial new technologies, which aids the industry in improving the efficiency of these technologies during usage [15]. The pharmaceutical industries in the United States, for instance, have admitted that over 25% of their new drugs could not have been developed without academic research centers [16]. African CoEs could establish [15] important research partnerships with international institutions, critically examining evidence for policy making, hence creating capacity to train future generations of researchers, and stimulating the national science and innovation systems.

To stimulate and enhance the national science and innovation systems of African countries, the African CoEs need to embrace an interdisciplinarity perspective in their planning and actions. Interdisciplinarity basically refers to the broader units of inquiry, the intellectual units that structure the framework in which day-to-day decisions, actions, and interpretations are carried out by groups of scientists’ [17]. Therefore, interdisciplinarity should not be described as a particular type of knowledge, but rather in terms of a form of cooperation between areas of knowledge or specialisms in science. One way of describing such cooperation is through the notions of interaction and integration [17].

Interdisciplinary capacity is imperative to look at complex problems critically from multiple perspectives and give solutions in an innovative way. Innovative solutions to problem are very rarely the function of a solo endeavor. Therefore, working in a disciplinary way is against the purpose and nature of CoEs. The essence of a discipline is that of a unified, autonomous corpus of knowledge, and an area of expertise. Students will be “disciplined” in this area through instruction and research of the profession [18].

Therefore, the African CoEs are expected to connect researchers, improving cooperation between and among researchers across disciplines and geographical areas. They are critically significant to impact and stimulate the national science systems of African countries. The African CoEs are expected to create “frontiers in different fields of science” and “internationally competitive (world-class) research capabilities.”

6. Perils of African CoEs

The African CoEs do have potentials, as intended, to transform the African sociocultural and politico-economic consequences. However, in science there has been opportunities within challenges and vice versa— there have always been perils within potentials. Therefore, this section presents the perils of the African CoEs. This is important to fully harvest the fruits of these centers.

6.1 Autonomy and academic freedom

The African CoEs could and should combine issues of quality and relevance of education and research within the backdrop of the culture of African HEIs, in particular, and the continent, in general. Therefore, the African CoEs should uphold, present, and satisfies some unique conditions for long-term viability.

As indicated previously, the African CoEs are initiated by multinational organizations, which are based out of the continent. The quality indicators and monitoring and evaluation mechanism, therefore, are given to the African HEIs as part of the whole package of CoEs. Hence, they could violate and contradict with the established quality assurance systems of the specific countries and the continental large. The continent has been standardizing the African higher education guidelines for quality assurance.

Therefore, the African CoEs could face problems in getting much-needed support from individual academics at various levels as they could be perceived as affecting the academic freedom of individuals and the autonomy of institutions as they are imported. In other words, the role of autonomy and academic freedom, which are the lifeblood of the African CoEs are not espoused clearly and loudly. Excellence is among several organizational imperatives that risk creating a compliance culture at universities, where indicators are often imposed from the outside, thereby undermining autonomy [19].

CoEs can cater to university needs by diversifying their structures cognitively and institutionally into the postmodern university [20]. Ultimately, CoEs could fail to get the buy-in from the hosting HEIs for successful organization-wide adoption and cross-functional collaboration to leverage expertise, for the perceived lack of academic freedom. This is the very vision and mission of the establishment of the African CoEs. CoE could preferably be realized [20] via a sound governance structure that ensures autonomy and self-direction and broadly accepted commitment to academic values. Therefore, the African CoE as an influential brand to stimulate best practices serving as a new organizing principle for positive change in HEIs might not be working.

The African CoEs are established not as standalone centers, but as confirmed parts of a legal institution as a separate division in HEIs. Leadership is one of the critical components of a CoE. The CoEs require powerful and goal-oriented leadership to passionately lead a team in a given direction and drive toward success. The CoE leader should have the maximum commitment to achieving excellence, with the potential to influence the overall functions and long-term visions of the CoE. Arguably, the chance of the very presence of the CoE in the premises of HEIs, changing the ethos of these positively appears to be limited or rear. As a result, Ref. [19] recognizes the trade-offs are necessary to establish excellence milieus in academic settings and associated risks on the institutional level.

The aforementioned institutional governance characteristics of African CoEs are not attuned to the very nature of the leadership of African HEIs. The leadership of the hosting African HEIs is not visionary, vigilant, and agile. In most cases, the Vice Chancellors and Presidents, with the exception of a few have been appointed because of their political affiliations with the ruling party in the disguised/ in the name of competition and election. Leaders are not, in most cases, appointed because of their merits. Vice Chancellors and Presidents have a widely acknowledged limited capacity for fundraising and even worse misappropriation of grants, procurement and monitoring processes, and hiring or training procedures of existing personnel. Even, trying to change these malaises through imposition might not be helpful to bring the desired/anticipated change.

Therefore, the asymmetric ways of appointment of leaders and leadership characteristics could cast more shadow on the perusal of the mission on part of the African CoEs.

The establishment of CoE needs critical research infrastructure, the existence of specific relationships, availability of funding, high research quality and productivity, resource attraction and concentration, international visibility and attractiveness, and organizational robustness [14]. African CoEs, therefore, is equated to “being better,” which could mean, excellence in research, top-quality professors, favorable working conditions, sustainable financing mechanisms, job security and good salary and benefits, adequate facilities, adequate funding, academic freedom, public-private partnerships or generation of revenues through consultancy, training or research services, and atmosphere of intellectual excitement, and faculty self-governance [21]. The CoE emphasizes the ability to attract academic “stars” and mainly collegial consultation over resource allocation [21].

The abovementioned, can create divisions within existing academic environments in terms of resource distribution. In other words, the CoEs are characterized by the concentration of resources. The resource concentration might not be compatible with the limited resource provisions of other units within the institution in question. The resources allocation to the CoEs might not be “democratic” and equitable and may be socially as well as cognitively unacceptable to move scarce resources to a very few high performers in the research system [11]. Besides, there could be also a risk that the multifaceted functions of the university suffer, as excellence may push out relevance and societal engagement.

6.2 Epistemic congruence vis-a-vis violence

CoEs are significant to build institutional research capacity, which in turn has an effect in terms of results, hypotheses, and novel instrumentation. As such, how to construct research problems, which types of projects to pursue, how to divide research labor in terms of these problems, etc. are also among the effects of the CoE. All these are aggregated as an invention of new research methods and knowledge. CoEs are important for “epistemic venturing,” pursuing risky projects that generate and test new hypotheses and attempts to develop new theories [11]. In a nutshell, epistemic effects, such as discovery processes, are the effects of the CoE. Hence, one of the core missions of African CoEs have been relevant knowledge production and effective and efficient mechanic dissemination of it (knowledge).

Through participatory methods, research design and interpretation of data and knowledge production can become Afro-sensed [22]. The process of Afro-sensing in research does not exclude scientific epistemology but seeks to blend ways of knowing and disseminating knowledge [22]. Therefore, the African CoEs should be avenues, where diverse epistemic and knowledge production takes place, including non-Western knowledge and ways of knowing.

Therefore, the African CoEs should be considered as the decolonizing instrument of African HEIs. Not only do they require responding the Eurocentric ideologies and knowledge production, but also balance the tension between European epistemic traditions and African knowledge systems [23]. The African CoEs are poised to respond to the call for transformation related to higher education in many ways, including the promotion of African indigenous knowledge. This could be a challenge as the African HEIs, starting from the political dependence of the continent, have not only been expanding without epistemic independence.

The Africa CoEs need to be defined not only primarily in relation to excellence predicate, but also in terms of the broader sociocultural imperatives inside and outside of science proper. Africa CoEs should position themselves in the African continent to become relevant to the socioeconomic transformation of Africa and Africans. Therefore, Africa CoEs needed to revitalize indigenous knowledge systems. Therefore, the promotion and incorporation of indigenous knowledge into the development ACoEs projects through explicit procedures involving traditional practitioners are of high significance.

However, there appears to be a problem as far as epistemic justice is concerned within the African CoEs. The African HEIs themselves, needless to mention the African CoEs, have been influenced by colonial or western ideologies and dominated by Anglo-Saxon academic tradition. Creating epistemic congruence and coherence between the African CoEs and African societies is a difficult one, lingering and even compounding the epistemic violence of the African CoEs.

7. Conclusions

The African CoEs do have significant scientific, political, economic, and social impacts. However, these impacts appear reduced because of the lack or absence of CoEs’ quality assurance and enhancement mechanism within the framework of the African context.

Hence, a comprehensive framework of external and internal evaluation is to guide and inspire Africa CoEs, and to help governments and funding agencies shape and oversee them.

There have never been established criteria for the African CoEs within the context of the continent to do baselines assessment and plan continuous improvements. Therefore, clearly demonstrating success is a sticking point.

The attempt of setting common milestones applicable to all CoEs across the globe might be misleading. Although it is of paramount significance to have global indicators, it is still important to put local parameters to the ACoEs, which make them relevant to the continent.

The lack of vibrate leadership on the part of the HEIs hosting the African CoEs appears negatively, affecting the spillover effect of the CoEs on the general function and arrangement of the hosting institutions.

The African CoEs need to promote a global view, aiming at enhancing healthy competition on a global platform and promoting the development of globalized knowledge, while at the same time promoting the African indigenous knowledge and skill bases.