Democratising Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Opportunity Structures and Social Processes

Abstract

Widening participation in higher education can be a force for democratisation and differentiation. In the developing world, there has been scant research and theorisation of how different structures of inequality intersect or how higher education relates to policy discourses of poverty reduction and the Millennium Development Goals. Socio-cultural theory has not been widely applied to research on higher education in low-income countries, nor has there been consideration of the part that private higher education plays in widening participation. In short, there has been limited scholarship on the sociology of higher education in low-income countries. This paper is based on our ESRC/DFID funded research project on Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard (www.sussex.ac.uk/education/wideningparticipation). Findings to date suggest that opportunity structures reflect social inequalities.