Abstract
Consistent economic downturns, political uprisings, and social upheavals from the 1980s have significantly depleted the quality of higher education in Africa, particularly graduate training. While remarkable strides in graduate training have been made in countries such as South Africa relative to other parts of the continent, policy and funding challenges continue to threaten the quality of students and programs. Over the past two decades, new forms of institutional collaborations aimed at revamping graduate training in sub-Saharan Africa have emerged. Debates on how to revamp the higher education system are ongoing among scholars, policymakers, administrators, and funders, but minimal attention is paid to the students’ voices, particularly women’s that speak to the dire conditions under which graduate training is carried out. To spur more discussion about this gap in literature, we conducted focus group discussions with female graduate students in four higher education institutions in Nigeria and South Africa. Our participants identified five major challenges that graduate students often wrestle with: financial challenges, limited sources of and dated curricular materials, institutional infrastructure and program logistics, academic supervision, and gender relations among students as well as between students and scholars. These challenges, our participants assert, often place female graduate students in a more vulnerable position than their male counterparts. Our findings, though preliminary, point to the need to actively engage students, especially women, in academic debates and initiatives aimed at improving graduate training in Africa.
Highlights
Despite the globally unimpressive economic trends that characterize the 21st century, a significant number of Western funding agencies have sustained and, in some cases, expanded their collaborations with Sub-Saharan African higher education institutions as well as major research centers
As a first step in addressing this gap in the literature, our study explored the experiences of female graduate students in four higher education institutions in Nigeria and South Africa
African female graduate students are a diverse group; their experiences are mediated by class, race, religion, and so on, but we focus on their commonalities, including (i) a common experience of being “gendered” and racialized by culture, colonization, and capitalism (Kandiyoti, 2010); (ii) structures changes in gender roles within and outside the family that impact on women’s quality of life and access to social opportunities;(iii) the history, culture, and social circumstances that often privilege men over women in higher education
Summary
Despite the globally unimpressive economic trends that characterize the 21st century, a significant number of Western funding agencies have sustained and, in some cases, expanded their collaborations with Sub-Saharan African higher education institutions as well as major research centers. Since the mid-1940s, Fulbright, the United States’ most prominent exchange program, has provided scholars in six global regions, including Sub-African Africa, the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research. The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, initiated in 2013, aims to improve graduate training, curriculum development, and student mentoring through institutional collaboration between African-born scholars in the United States and Canada and their counterparts in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda (CADFP, 2018). International collaboration and funding form part of the broader strategic initiatives that contribute to the positive ratings (top 500 in the world) of at least five South African universities in global university rankings (Shanghai, 2017)
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