NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Strengths and Weaknesses in Institutional Partnerships between Northern and Southern Academic Institutions
By Paschal B. Mihyo, Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA)
Email: Mihyop@yahoo.comKeywords
Academic partnerships, Europe-Africa
Summary
There are major differences in the ways that partnerships have worked in government linked scientific research institutes and regular departments. The former are part of known institutional strategies; the ownership and institutionalization of many university links are much less strong. The key to the improvement of the latter is much more institutional embeddedness.
Introduction
Partnerships between African and European academic institutions are as old as formal higher education in Africa. Some of the best universities in the African region were launched as colleges of European universities before independence. In the last four decades cooperation has become stronger and taken various forms the most prominent of which have been: staff development, technical assistance, joint teaching and research programmes and staff exchange. These partnerships have managed to create a critical mass of highly skilled professionals; put and keep in place solid infrastructure; upgrade equipment and stocks in libraries and laboratories; support staff development and counter the tide of staff capacity erosion; establish and strengthen innovation centres in engineering, medical and agricultural research; provide back up support for academic management training and staff exchange; provide budget support for universities and research institutes and most important help academic institutions to enrich their curricula through joint courses in the region along with staff training abroad. These gains could be further strengthened and new ones maximized if some of the factors that have reduced the dynamism of these partnerships could be addressed.
What has worked or not worked with partnerships
The most successful partnerships in Africa have been in centres of innovation in faculties of engineering; national medical research institutes and national and regional agricultural, forestry and livestock research institutes. The factors that have contributed to their success are numerous. First regional and national institutes are governmental or inter-governmental and their ownership and demand orientation are uncontested and clear. Partly due to this, they enjoy the recognition, respect and support of bilateral and multilateral agencies. This factor is missing in other types of partnerships especially those based in universities. In the case of the latter, the programmes are owned by faculties, departments or in some cases individuals. The fingerprints of universities or sectors relevant to the link programmes in some universities are very faint. This creates problems of ownership, demand orientation and recognition that affect their relevance, scale, span of life and size of their funding.
Secondly, the programmes that are run by engineering, medical, agricultural research and innovation institutes are institutional; they are built within their strategic plans which show road maps of their human resources, financial and other growth perspectives; they are used as a base for performance evaluation and by development agencies and northern academic institutions for decisions whether or not to enter into partnerships with them. Most of the institutes and departments in universities that have links and partnerships programmes lack this. They have not developed long term strategic plans spelling out the role of development cooperation in their short term and long term plans. This undermines the scope, scale, size and span of their projects.
Third, the goals and expectations of partners matter. In the case of institutes of research, the goals of cooperation tend to be clear. They are stated in the statutes or projects that reflect institutional thinking. In the case of university-based links and partnership projects clarity is missing. In two big projects in which the author was involved in Namibia and Zimbabwe, it was clear that the expectations of the partners were different. The actors from the North expected to learn though joint research and to leave capacity for continuation of the programme after the initial phase. But in both cases, local partners saw the programme differently. Whenever the northern partners came, the local partners took time off to do other more important things especially individual consultancies and only participated in teaching activities that carried extra pay funded by the projects. When the projects ended no learning had taken place and the northern partners did not want to extend cooperation.
Learning systems is the fourth issue. Having participated in partnerships also from the north, I wanted the activities to generate critical capabilities in local institutions. In the Namibian and Zimbabwe projects, the projects had slots for Ph.D. studies. The local counterparts were not equally excited about this. They went on using the project to take time off and do consultancies and training opportunities were not utilized adequately. But the research institutes on the other hand have training programmes in their plans and when they send trainees for higher studies, they create conditions for utilizing them on their completion of training. In the absence of learning and capacity utilization plans, partnerships can easily lead to internal brain drain if local experts use them to work on other non-organizational activities or facilitate brain drain if experts are trained but no plans are put in place for their gainful utilization.
Making partnerships work better
The best way to ensure maximum gains from partnerships is to step back and take a look at the way we have been operating and then design ways of doing things rather differently. First, we need to strengthen ownership by institutionalizing links and projects. This needs institutional and sector wide approaches. Departments and universities are part of the national and regional structures and their programmes should reflect national and regional priorities. The finger and foot prints of universities, relevant ministries and regional bodies on link programmes should be clear and indelible. Secondly, while individuals matter, partnerships based on individuals tend to disappear with or because of them. Partnerships should be institutional, should be based on long term plans and should be part of the human resources and other strategic maps of organizations involved. Third, partnerships should be long term and not based on fashion or fad but on long term objectives of knowledge generation, application and sharing. Finally, partnerships should design clear platforms and mechanisms for generating, sharing, utilizing and internalizing knowledge. Unless this is done they will be a waste of time and resources, and a disappointment to partners on both sides and to the intended beneficiaries.
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