Professor Barnabas Nawangwe Presents Makerere University, the Harvard of Africa

Interview with Professor Barnabas Nawangwe, Vice Chancellor of Makerere University

What are the major challenges that universities are facing in Uganda?

If I begin with the current circumstances we are in, universities in Uganda are facing the same challenges as universities everywhere else in the world. It really does not matter at what level of development the countries are, the challenges are the same. The challenges brought about by COVID-19 are challenges of uncertainty, especially about whether people can afford to pay fees for their education. In the pre-COVID circumstances, the challenges that we faced as higher education, and the universities in particular, were not completely different. Makerere as a government institution is, in a way, shielded from the problems that face universities that must look for their own resources to survive. The salaries of our staff are paid for almost completely by the government. We contribute a small portion of that from the money that is raised from student fees. But the bulk of the salaries, which is the main expenditure for any university, is paid for by government, almost 90%. So, for public universities, they actually may not be facing the same challenges as the private universities. Issues to do with the student welfare, infrastructure development, and maintenance are always a challenge because we have never raised enough money to ensure that we are able to maintain our land to acceptable levels. We are not able to expand our infrastructure or replace the ones that become obsolete. That is the situation with any of the public universities.

Another challenge is research funding. At Makerere University, we are lucky that the government started funding us directly for research from last year, otherwise we would have had to depend on donors for research. We have been getting quite a lot of money from donors and that is why we are able to do a lot of research and rank very highly, not only in Africa, but globally, because we have been supported very, very well by international donors over quite a long time. But that is not the same situation with the other public universities. The younger ones do not have the same opportunities, so they are not able to do research that one can talk about. Those are the challenges that could be facing the public universities.

As far as the students are concerned, public universities still take the cream of the students that come because part of them are funded by government and others still want to go to a public university because they think it is more secure for them. They think their degrees will be more recognized and therefore, it gives a kind of security for their future. Otherwise, we really do not face challenges from that side of the students. We actually get more students than we need and we are beginning to cut down on the number of students that we admit because we are taking on too many which is constraining our research capabilities.

The private universities definitely face bigger challenges such as funding, generally, because they must raise the resources not only to maintain their facilities and do research, but they must actually run the university completely on their own with only the resources they raise on their own. In the circumstances of Uganda, we cannot charge very high fees. Other universities actually look to see how much Makerere is charging before they set their own rates. When we started the private program about 30 years ago, we set our fees quite low because the tradition had been that all higher education is paid for by government, and we were not very sure at that time whether people would be willing to pay for higher education. We introduced the private programs because the demand for higher education was increasing. But due to the bad policies at that time, the government was not actually putting much money into higher education. So, to cover the gap that was being created by the government slowly pulling away from funding the universities, we created these private programs. Because we wanted to attract people at that time, we set the fees low and that was very dangerous because we have never been able to increase those fees realistically. The universities in the region that learned from us then set their fees at reasonable rates and they are not suffering the same.

How easy is it for you to network with other universities across the globe?

Makerere was always known as the “Harvard of Africa” and that name has worked for us through the difficult things that we went through. It has been easy for us to develop relationships to the extent that now, we also have to choose with whom we can collaborate and with whom we cannot collaborate.

On that issue, again, Makerere cannot be the benchmark for the rest of the universities in Uganda because Makerere is unique in that sense. After the political turmoil that we experienced in this country, when this new government come to power, for some reason we received a lot of goodwill from international agencies. A lot of agencies wanted to work with Makerere. And so, we have had a very good relationship with the international funding agencies and with the other top universities in the world to the extent that the Times Higher Education ranks us as the most international university as far as publishing with researchers at other universities is concerned. There is no university which has more partnerships in that sense than Makerere University in the whole world. In the early 90s, we came up with a policy that all faculty must have a PhD before they can be employed as lecturers at Makerere University. That requirement looked like it was going to be very difficult to achieve. But today, due to the support we have received, particularly from SIDA of Sweden, and NORAD of Norway, it is now a very easy thing. Now, more than 70% of our faculty have PhDs and almost everybody else are in PhD programs. Over that period of 20 years, we have been able, through the support from SIDA, to train 400 of our staff to get PhDs and another 200 are still on that program. I estimate that maybe in the next five years, if we follow the same trend, everybody who is teaching at Makerere University will have a PhD. Makerere University is unique in this. We have had very great support and goodwill from the international community. Our funders include SIDA and NORAD, the British Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Those are just the major ones that are supporting us and that have been supporting us for the last 30 years. We are considered the most collaborative university. Now, our collaborations include many international universities, practically on every continent, but of course, the biggest collaborations are with universities in Europe and the United States, and also universities within Africa. But increasingly, we are getting collaborations even with universities in India and China and other areas of the world. Now, that is not necessarily true of all the other universities. They do not have the same kind of opportunities that we have had. For us, it was our historical name working for us. Makerere was always known as the “Harvard of Africa” and that name has worked for us through the difficult things that we went through. It has been easy for us to develop those relationships to the extent that now, we also have to choose with whom we can collaborate and with whom we cannot collaborate.

What is your strategy on digitalization?

The government and the people have always known that universities are very key in the development of the country, but this has been brought up much more during COVID-19. The role of the university in society has never been more felt than during this pandemic because we have been able to participate directly in handling the consequences of the virus. Our medical students and the faculty have been busy helping in the hospitals. Our researchers have come up with innovations that have been designed to help to minimize the effects of the pandemic, including coming up with ventilators and specialized tents for isolation of patients and a lot of other innovations, all geared at managing the pandemic. Whenever people talk about COVID-19 in this country, the name Makerere immediately springs up. So, that has helped us to gain that confidence from the population that yes, it is important to invest in higher education, because people have always been skeptical to invest in higher education first when there are other priorities. Now, everybody appreciates that the investments in higher education can bring a lot of benefits. Now, like everybody else, we are affected in a very big way as far as teaching is concerned, and we have to be innovative. We already have a policy which was passed back in 2015 on what we call online distance and e-learning. The intention at that time when we came up with the policy was because our population is exploding. We will not have the capacity to absorb all the young people who are yearning for higher education in the current infrastructure in the universities that we have, and particularly for Makerere University where so many people want to come. We want to reduce the number so that our staff can engage more in research. We do not want to increase the numbers. So, we have had this policy, but we were moving with it slowly because there was nothing to push us. We were comfortable that we are a top university and everybody wants to come here. We basically do not have any competition in this country. And so, we were not really hurrying with implementing our own policy; although, even before that policy, we were already doing distance education. We have had programs here which are completely distance education for the last 20 years, including Bachelor in Commerce by distance education and Bachelor in Education by distance education. COVID-19 has shaken us and we see that we need to wake up. We are now working very hard to move all our programs online because we are not even sure that we will be allowed to open for physical teaching at the university for the large number of students that we have.

At the moment, the government has allowed us to reopen for final year medical students and is now talking about allowing us to open for the rest of the final year students. When we will be able to open for the rest of the students, we are not sure, but we want to minimize the negative consequences of remaining closed for a long time on the university and also on the students. So, we are moving on the digitalization agenda very fast. Luckily, we have the best IT infrastructure in Africa outside of South Africa. We consume more bandwidth than some countries in Africa. We are lucky because of the support that we have had, particularly by NORAD and the SIDA, in that when we were implementing our research agenda and developing our PhD capacities, they helped us to establish a very comprehensive and advanced IT system, including a cable system on campus which is more than 30 kilometers long. We consume more than 2000 megabytes per second of bandwidth, which is probably almost a third of all the bandwidth consumed in this country. So, we have got all the necessary infrastructure, we have been doing an intensive training of all our faculty who are not conversant with online education, we have an institute of online and distance education which is also helping to coordinate the move to online education. Also, for more than 10 years, we have had our university e-learning system which we call MUELE, Makerere University E-Learning Environment, which is based on the mobile systems. We are now planning that and we have already applied to the National Council for Higher Education to allow us to move online for all the students. They came and inspected our facilities and then we had those discussions with them. They agreed that not only we should move online, but they think it is our responsibility to assist all the other universities to do the same. We have been lucky in that not every university in the region has the kind of facilities that we have. However, some of the challenges that we are still facing are challenges to do with the students. We did a survey, as we were required by the National Council, to see how many students would be able or would be willing to move to online education. 70% of the students said yes, they are ready to move. The other 30% said they are willing but they do not have the facilities. Those students are in very rural areas where there is no electricity. Even if they have phones, they have to move many kilometers away just so they can charge their phones. Some say they do not even have smartphones or laptops. So, there is a small minority who say they are willing but they are not ready because of the lack of facilities. But still, we have to move. Our challenge is now how to handle those that said they do not have the facilities. We are trying to work around that issue to see if, for example, students can buy laptops or smartphones on a hire purchase basis and we are negotiating with the banks to see if they can put in place facilities to do that. And for those students whose problem is the electricity and lack of connectivity is to see whether we can use alternative methods. For example, for those who cannot attend online lessons, the material will be uploaded on the system, then they can go and download it and they will be given an opportunity to have tutorials through email with their professors. It is a big problem, but we have no other option but to move forward with the resources that we have. We are not going to wait until everybody has the advanced facilities for us to implement the online aspect. We will go ahead with what we have and we shall develop our capacities as we implement.

Is the government saying that it is Makerere’s responsibility to do that?

This is our own initiative as a university. Of course, there are students and even maybe to an extent some faculty as well, who will say that we do not have money to pay for the internet usage. And so, we have negotiated with the major providers of internet such as MTN, Airtel, and Africell to do zerorating of our websites where our materials are. So, anybody accessing our websites through their phones or laptops are not charged by the service provider. Now, of course, when we go fully online, the volume of the traffic will be very high. Those telecoms have said that they are not sure that they will continue with that kind of arrangement. We have proposed that the university will meet the bandwidth that is used by our students and teachers. So, we will negotiate with the service providers to subsidize and instead of asking the people who are using our sites to pay, the university will pay directly but at a reduced rate. Those telecoms that we are working with have indicated that that is acceptable to them. The initiative is also ours to negotiate with the bank to provide laptops. What the government has done is just to say that they encourage us to move online and can we prove that we are ready. Beyond that, the government for now is not doing anything, because they are overwhelmed by the challenges that they are facing. They have to cater for the primary schools and secondary schools who make up millions of children. Until they are able to figure out what they can do with those students, they really will not be very much bothered with what happens at the university because they assume that we can actually handle some of these things. So, we are not waiting for the government. We are taking these initiatives on ourselves.

What is your major remaining challenge?

The challenge, of course, is managing the university in the current circumstances where everybody is away from the university. We are maintaining a skeleton staff to ensure that certain things can move on. We have, of course, to pay salaries to people so we must maintain a staff to work on that. We have to ensure that the people who do research that cannot be suspended continue doing their research. So, for that, the facilities must be working. We must have water. We must have electricity working. We must have buildings cleaned. We must have the internet working because without that then even the research will suffer. We must work on issues of students who have applied to come the university for the next year. People must be here to work on those processes such as admission, writing letters, etc. The other challenge, of course, is that we have taken the initiatives ourselves to test every member of our staff for coronavirus, where the government does not have resources to do mass testing, and they do not expect this of the population. There have been proposals that people should be paying for their own tests and that is causing a big debate in this country. People are just coming out of COVID-19, they are poor, they cannot even buy food, then the government wants them to pay for their testing. But we have some facilities. We have testing facilities from our collaborators. For example, we have received support from the Case Western Reserve University in the United States. They have sent us 20,000 testing kits. We have also received testing kits from a university in the Netherlands. And so, we are using the facilities we have to test our own staff so that we are sure of the extent to which our people may be infected so that even as students come, we know how better to handle the students. Personally, many people think that with COVID, I must have a lot of time. Actually, I am working much more than I was before the pandemic because now, I am handling work which should be done by another 50 people because they are not here. So, that is a bit of a challenge. But otherwise, the main challenge is the fact that the university campus looks deserted, and there is no life on it. And that does not look very good for a Vice Chancellor.

What inspired you to get into the field of education?

I am a trained architect. I got very interested in the vernacular architecture. And when I came back from the Soviet Union where I studied, I looked around my country and I saw that a lot of the heritage was actually disappearing. I put my effort into recording the architectural heritage of this country. As I went ahead, of course, I got interested in the quality of life of the people here in Uganda. And I realized that homesteads where people were educated were much better off than homesteads where maybe they did not have anybody educated at a high level. I began to realize that if we want to change the lives of our people, education is key. And I personally now believe that without education, and particularly higher education, being very much involved in the development agenda of this country, we are very unlikely to transform our society and improve people’s livelihoods. So, from that time when I saw those conditions, I thought that I must make a contribution. And my contribution is in improving the way our university contributes to national development. I have traveled widely, and I have seen what universities can do to change their societies. I have been to places like Malaysia, India, China, and I have seen what the universities there have done to contribute to changing their societies and I have seen that universities in Africa are lagging behind in that. So, I got the conviction that we must change the way our universities work. We must increase the research in these universities. We must increase the contribution, even to the local communities, by the universities. Therefore, I decided that I must do something. I must do something to transform the way universities in Africa work. So, a lot of my work has been on raising resources for our researchers to do research. Coming up with innovations is something that I am passionate about. I am convinced that this is what we have to do. I have had people ask on several occasions why we are spending so much money and what can be done. What can universities do apart from producing people who are looking for jobs? We are changing that. I always give an example of a very bad famine which happened in eastern Uganda about 15 years ago. Thousands of people were starving and hundreds were dying because there was a long drought followed by famine. A group of researchers at Makerere and another research facility in Uganda came up with a variety of cassava, which is resistance to drought, and this was distributed to the communities in eastern Uganda. Since that time, we have had droughts which are even worse than that drought which caused a lot of suffering. But we have not had anybody starving in eastern Uganda because of that one single innovation. I always say that you do not need so many people to cause a change, but you need a few people with the knowledge to cause that change. And so, my life is dedicated to ensuring that this kind of innovation is scaled up and that we can get more and more of the young people coming up in higher education and coming up with innovations. Once we do this systematically, we can actually change the conditions of our people in a very short time. So that is why I have been here for the last 35 years.

How would you like Uganda to be perceived worldwide? What is your dream for the country?

I always tell my visitors that there is every reason they should come to Uganda because if they really are interested in Africa and Africans, then Uganda is the summary of all of Africa because this country has every ethnic group of people in Africa. We have a very diverse culture. I do not know of a country with a more diverse cultural heritage than Uganda. Uganda has an amazing biodiversity, both in the fauna and flora. I do not know of any other country that is so endowed. At the same time, we have been known for a very long time for the wrong reasons such as civil wars and other bad things. We have put civil wars behind us, but we must reclaim the image. Churchill is quoted as saying Uganda is the Pearl of Africa. I wish we had remained like that- peaceful, beautiful. We have a very, very nice people. We have kind people, but it is the same people who have been engaged in civil wars. And so, what can we as academics and universities do to ensure the sustainability of a culture of peace and also to make Uganda reclaim that lost glory of the black people? Of course, as Africans, we take very seriously the Black Lives Matter issue because it in a way translates directly on what is the dignity of the black people. If, in Africa, we can remove that perception that the black people are always going to be backward, and show that we can do things and also do them just as well as other people, that is going to emancipate the image of the black people the world over. I want Uganda to be an example. That is why we have innovations like the Kiira electric vehicle. I tell the young people that they are not different from other people. You just need to free your brain and you can do everything that other people can do. That is my vision for Uganda. It should be a prosperous nation, the people should be respected just like anywhere else in the world, and if we can do it here and it is emulated all over Africa, I am sure that the marginalization of this continent will stop. We need to emphasize the point that higher education is extremely important in the transformation of this continent. Governments should invest properly in higher education. African governments have a lot of challenges and therefore a lot of priorities and there might be the tendency to think that with higher education, the returns may take a very long time so you should invest somewhere where you will get quicker returns. But there is the saying that “Rome was not built in a day.” This continent had some of the best universities in ancient times. Through wars, we destroyed everything that we had built and it has taken so long to rebuild what was lost. But it can be done. Many other civilizations which have suffered similarly have proved this. The importance of higher education and supporting higher education is extremely important. Whenever we have that opportunity, we should try to drive the point home to whoever takes the decisions on these matters.

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