Beyond this privileged access to the human and material actants that facilitate the completion of a PhD, the special advantage of fulltime training abroad is that it is relatively easy to create contiguous stretches of time to concentrate on one's own work. A three- or fouryear foreign PhD programme removes young Ugandan scientists from their social and economic obligations to most of their family, friends, colleagues and institutions in Uganda. This drastic and often emotionally painful curtailment of their sociality creates a vacuum that can be filled with lab time, reading, writing and networking with other scientists. Few PhD programmes leave any space for the extra jobs or consultancies that have become the norm for academics in Uganda, and work permits are rarely included in student visas anyway.

A few lucky candidates may be able to bring along and support a spouse and perhaps a young child on their modest stipends. But those with larger families and/or spouses who have careers of their own must generally leave even these closest relations at home. This means that, apart from intermittent Skype connections, the time that would otherwise be spent eating, playing with children and attending weekend events with the family no longer competes with research time. Furthermore, invitations to funerals and weddings that often oblige Ugandan-based researchers to leave their stations for a few days or a week at a time, to attend to their commitments to their extended families, no longer hinder the completion of an experiment, attendance at a seminar, or the finishing of a draft text.

Despite these advantages, and partly because of their immediate social and economic costs, 75 per cent of participants in this study indicated that they would prefer a sandwich programme or an entirely domestic programme to full-time study abroad. This is explained by the fact that the fulfilment of Ugandan scientists' aspirations (and those of scientists from other sub-Saharan countries) is not exclusively dependent on access to the most expensive and advanced scientific equipment or the ability to produce new knowledge for audiences at the wealthiest of universities. Too often, such paths lead away from Uganda, via the brain drain, and spending years abroad can make reintegration into professional and family networks exceedingly difficult (Gaillard et al. 2015).

For scientists who intend to live and work in Uganda, full-time training abroad can work at cross-purposes to their goals to live in and contribute to improving the quality of life in their homeland, to support their families, and someday build a home to which they can retire. For most scientists that I met, and for women in particular, the prospect of spending several years in a foreign country, far from their immediate and extended families, was an unwelcome idea. Women who had studied abroad full-time generally did so when they were young and before they had children. Dr Kisembo, for example, explained that 'problems related to families would be the main problem' for students who enrol in full-time training programmes. She hoped donors would note that

these programmes where someone has to go away from home for over six months, for the ladies especially, they are not good … You can go, and [when you] come back the marriage can't work anymore. (interview, 1 May 2014)

Men who studied abroad full-time, and missed out on seeing their children for years, generally described their separation as a personal hardship, but prevailing gender norms mean that such separations are less risky for the stability of their marriages. While a man might expect support from his wife for deciding to spend several years abroad studying for a PhD, it is rare for a Ugandan woman to be able to justify to her husband that she should do the same. In general, gendered cultural norms with respect to duties towards children and spouse were the primary factors that women scientists identified as limiting their advancement in academic careers.

Beyond risking family and social relations, full-time study abroad can also significantly undermine individuals' chances of obtaining work in Uganda after completing their degrees. The learned and embodied knowledges obtained abroad sometimes replace other forms of knowledge that are essential for success in Uganda. With experience of training for a masters degree at an elite university in Europe, and later for a PhD in another African country, Dr Nalwanga reflected on the dangers that full-time studies can pose to the relevance of Ugandan scientists in their own country:

I've seen colleagues that do high-tech science in molecular biology. They get a very advanced degree and they have handled all these machines … But then they come back to a lab where they don't even have a PCR machine, which is a routine thing. So how are they going to manage? … You don't want to train abroad and then come back and you seem to be redundant … yet you are not. (interview, 28 April 2014)

The redundancy that Dr Nalwanga describes occurs as a result of training programmes that encourage scientists to engage in research related to the scientific priorities of their supervisors in the host countries. Redundancy can also result from the tendency to become overly reliant on scientific equipment that is standard in foreign countries, but which might not be available in Uganda due to prohibitive costs and/or the lack of infrastructure.

To cope with laboratories characterised by a scarcity of technicians and spare parts, as well as an intermittent supply of electricity and an overabundance of dust and humidity, Ugandan scientists require the kind of knowledge and creativity seldom cultivated in wealthy research environments. On returning to Uganda, the networks and knowledge that one imagined might open doors to international research funding and opportunities are often undermined by the impossibility of assembling the tools and human resources perceived to be necessary to facilitate local research. Hence, while the facts produced by scientists may travel across continents in the form of 'immutable mobiles' (Latour 1990), the actor-networks that Ugandan scientists enrol in (and are enrolled by) to produce PhD degrees are not nearly as adept at making the same kinds of transcontinental transfers.

From the perspective of training leaders in scientific research in Uganda, full-time study abroad can be disastrous. As Dr Mugisa, a Kampala-based scientist explained, his institution has had serious problems with PhD programmes that enrol their researchers in fulltime studies abroad:

We tend to lose a lot of our people to that environment. Even though in academics now we are saying that … with globalisation we can't have brain drain … and that wherever you are you can contribute to the global knowledge. But, looking at it from a selfish point of view, this institution goes over there to train and build its capacity, and it keeps losing its best scientists to other environments. (interview, 5 May 2014)

Dr Mugisa's critical stance towards full-time study abroad is based on its power to weaken social ties and alter scientific subjectivities. He is not alone in this view. Another recently retired professor explained that those who do eventually return are often so disoriented that many are lost to science, while others require months or years before they can begin to be productive. Another influential senior academic was vehement that Ugandan institutions should 'scrap these people' who had trained abroad full-time and had no pre-existing position in Uganda to return to.

In the course of my research, I met several scientists who had resigned from positions at Ugandan research institutions to take up scholarships to study abroad full-time, and had then experienced great difficulties in returning to their careers in Uganda. This was partly due to a mismatch between their new expertise and the local science infrastructure, but it was also linked to bureaucratic obstacles that prevent the absorption of qualified scientists who do not have existing employment contracts. Scientists who were offered a temporary leave of absence from their positions to undertake full-time study abroad were more easily, but seldom unproblematically, reabsorbed if they chose to return.

In general, the scientists I interviewed appreciated the quality of training they could gain by studying abroad, but they found the erosion of their scientific, social and economic ties in Uganda too costly to merit the sacrifice. And while full-time study abroad has the potential to equip scientists with the skills, networks, resources and ambitions to produce forms of scientific knowledge that are internationally appreciated and publishable, it does not necessarily equip them with the skills, networks, resources and ambitions that help them thrive in contemporary Uganda. Hence, despite the rapid advances in internet and related technologies that ease communication across great distances, longterm physical absence for training abroad significantly challenges Ugandan scientists' abilities to sustain their place in the actor-networks that matter most to them in Uganda.

### **Full-time training at home**

If full-time research training abroad is generally perceived to be contrary to the interests of scientists in Uganda, and to the interests of Uganda's scientific community more broadly, then full-time training at home might be expected to offer a solution. Post-colonial critiques of international science and development highlight the value of indigenous knowledge systems and the importance of resisting the domination of the modernist ideologies that originate in the metropoles (Kelly 1979; Tikly 2004). Other voices call for 'South–South' collaborations, whereby partners from several Southern countries pool resources to address problems of shared importance (Hassan 2001). In both instances, those who advocate the de-linking of scientific training from Northern actor-networks are concerned that African scientists forfeit too much of their own agency when they enrol (and are enrolled) in higher education institutions in the North. However, for the researchers and professors that I met in Uganda, the advantages of fulltime training at home relate less to the avoidance of what Eric Wolf (1966) might call patron–client ties with a global reach than they do to strengthening and maintaining their own local social, kinship and economic relations.

Dr Mugisa, who studied abroad for his PhD and whose current professional position affords him insight into the experiences of a range of Ugandan PhD candidates registered at multiple institutions, describes the main advantage of staying home as follows:

The basic advantage is that you are at home, which is familiar ground for you. You don't deal with issues of being away from home and missing your family. And at work everyone knows you and you are familiar with the facilities. You can multi-task and do any number of things. Many people will pursue their social careers as well and get good jobs at the same time that they are students. (interview, 5 May 2014)

Mugisa's references to family, 'social careers' and employment speaks to the entanglement of personal, entrepreneurial and scientific aspects of Ugandan scientists' lives. The attainment of a PhD is not only, or even primarily, a rite of passage in becoming an independent producer of new knowledge. Instead, it is a component of the broader project of producing material wealth and reproducing nuclear and extended family networks. Scientists who are firmly emplaced in the Ugandan context, and thus able to negotiate, reproduce and expand the actor-networks that underpin their work, often also have certain advantages in accessing the empirical materials that are central to the success of knowledge production. As Dr Ochieng explains, his local emplacement facilitates the collection of samples for his agricultural research:

The advantage is that you are in your local environment. You can move around easily to all parts of the country, and collect strains of the virus from all over. I have contacts all over. I can contact district officers and then go to the farms, and it is not a problem. (interview, 7 May 2014)

According to Dr Ochieng, the institutional gatekeepers, who guard the material basis of much agricultural and medical research in Uganda, are more likely to grant access to local PhD students, who are also employed by public institutions and whose local social networks are still intact. Conversely, researchers, from Uganda or elsewhere, who are explicitly attached to foreign research or training programmes, will have more difficulties in this regard.

However, while long-term integration into the local context does seem to simplify some matters for those who embark on a local PhD programme, the scientists I consulted generally agree that full-time domestic programmes are a poor alternative to the sandwich programmes described in more detail below. These scientists cited low salaries, sporadic supervision and limited opportunities for personal engagement with scientific communities outside of Uganda to explain their views.

Salaries and supervision are related. Salaries earned by academics at public universities in Uganda are considered by the scientists themselves to be insufficient to support their livelihoods. Even full-time employees spend a considerable amount of time on activities that generate additional income so that they can achieve what they see as an acceptable standard of living.5 One consequence of this is that local supervision of PhDs is done on a more or less voluntary basis – in the words of Dr Mugisa, it is as if 'someone is just doing you a favour'.

This means that PhD supervision is not only provided in a begrudging and inconsistent way, but also creates a kind of indebtedness to the supervisor. Students are expected to service this informal 'debt' through the co-authorship of publications and the rendering of unpaid assistance in the form of teaching and research. This further slows down the students' progress towards completing their degrees. As such, the relationship between supervisor and PhD student can be understood as belonging to a substantive cultural economy characterised by transactions linked to scientific recognition, knowledge and labour (see Halperin 1994).

With a handful of exceptions, most PhD candidates in Uganda enrol at the country's oldest and most prestigious higher education institution, Makerere University. At Makerere and elsewhere, local PhD programmes depend directly or indirectly on foreign funding. Funds might be earmarked for PhD training or cobbled together by senior scientists from one or more different projects from which they can allocate small amounts of funding towards supporting a PhD student's fieldwork and analysis. Either way, research priorities are strongly influenced by the interests of the foreign partners, but in such cases, the PhD student seldom benefits from direct engagement with those partners. Thus, completing a PhD exclusively in Uganda narrows the range of people, as well as the material and symbolic resources, that can be incorporated into the actor-networks that produce the degree, without significantly reducing the students' or the universities' dependence upon foreign resources.

Institutional hindrances to accessing primary empirical data sources may be less formidable for local PhD students, but laboratory equipment and consumables that can assist their analysis, together with access to such basics as electricity and transport can be difficult. And while it is rare for anyone to complain about the quality of supervision available in Uganda, it is widely acknowledged that the small number of trained and experienced scientists in Uganda limits the breadth of disciplinary expertise that PhD students can draw upon. The result is that local PhDs are perceived by Ugandan scientists as taking far too long to complete and as constrained by inadequate tools. While still dependent upon foreign resources, local degrees also offer too little exposure to foreign collaborators and research environments. The skills developed from such exposure, perhaps more so than specific personal relationships, were perceived by respondents in this study as essential for success in subsequent efforts to mobilise international funding for further research.

## **The sandwich-training model**

On an icy winter afternoon in 2014, David Ebine and I sat in a busy European café talking about his PhD training. At the time, he was nearing the end of a sandwich programme and he compared the opportunities he had to study at home with programmes spent partly or wholly abroad:

I also wanted to study abroad. The reason being that doing a PhD in Kampala can take you, if you are not careful [laughing], ten years. I think it is a systems issue, mixed with one's own personal commitments. So, most people who would like to do PhDs prefer doing them abroad because usually the turnaround time is short. It is almost half of the time it would take [in Uganda]. (interview, 14 February 2014)

Here, Ebine reiterated a common criticism of local PhD programmes and identified a key advantage of sandwich programmes and full-time study abroad: PhDs are finished far more quickly abroad than they are in Uganda.

For Dr Mpagi, an agricultural scientist who is active in several international and regional professional networks, the sandwich model has the added advantage that 'in the end you become relevant' (interview, 28 April 2014). For him, this relevance is a direct outcome of the multi-site nature of the training and of the PhD student's mobility.

Time spent abroad offers brief but significant respites from a wide range of social and economic commitments and obligations – from extra teaching at a private university, to managing a small business, to attending family events. As a result, PhD students tend to be far more focused and effective in the months they spend abroad. At the same time, the brevity of these interludes means that ties to place, family, and colleagues are not significantly eroded, nor are the capacities for creativity and patience that are essential for successful work in Ugandan institutional contexts. Meanwhile, continued dependence upon supervisors and, often, data collection in Uganda, counter the temptation to design and carry out research that might be highly valued in foreign institutions but not so much in Uganda.

As such, the sandwich model offers training in a liminal space that is neither mainly Ugandan nor mainly foreign. This liminality can be an asset to anyone seeking to broker disparate actor-networks while maintaining some creative space in which to achieve their own goals. Successful Ugandan scientists who continue to work in their homeland after completing their PhDs have learned to navigate and manipulate opportunities in a liminal zone that amalgamates local and foreign influences in ways that exceed the traditional bounds of what might be called a field of science (Bourdieu 2004).

To borrow from Sheila Jasanoff (2004), the Ugandan research environment is co-produced through the actions of individuals, organisations and material actants with diverse geographical origins. Sandwich-training models tend to be preferred by Ugandan scientists because these models are well suited to the environment. Sandwich models offer high quality training while preserving scientists' social and material ties to their home country. The model thus also favours the cultivation of a scientific subjectivity that seeks to engage with research questions that are closely tied to issues of concern in Uganda, while permitting the mobilisation of a variety of resources from both near and far.

## **Mobility, training and understanding one's future partners**

Another advantage of scientific mobility, and one that is often missed in studies on science research in low-income countries, is the value of exposure to new social and cultural environments (for an exception, see Ynalvez and Shrum 2009). Temporary mobility offers scientists an insight into the fractured geographies and uneven advantages of different research environments, while at the same time offering them opportunities to cultivate understandings of other cultures and academic traditions. In other words, immersion in foreign research, education and cultural contexts, equips Ugandan scientists to better understand and negotiate with foreign collaborators later in their careers.

Acquiring some life experience in countries such as the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden or Japan can improve Ugandan scientists' abilities to participate in internationally-sponsored projects, and to further their own individual and institutional interests within the context of such projects. These skills can be deployed in managing the kinds of known-unknowns that sustain partnerships with foreign actors despite the 'inherent political-economic contradictions' that lurk just below the surface of many collaborative research projects (Geissler 2013:13). A personal experience of mobility and immersion in another culture can also be an advantage to scientists who return to Uganda and seek to build collaborative research architectures that include the boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989) and slippery spaces that are necessary for facilitating the flow of resources across actor-networks and towards partly, or wholly, contradictory ends (Zink 2013).

As such, sandwich programmes can be an asset in the decolonisation, if not endogenisation (see Crossman 2004), of Ugandan science even as it continues to engage with global networks. Instead of reproducing and embodying power inequalities in new Ugandan PhDs, the sandwich model, through its periodic mobilities, offers researchers experiences and tools to engage and negotiate more successfully with foreign actors and their science agendas in Uganda. Unlike PhD programmes abroad, which can create significant hiatuses in Ugandan scientists' networks in Uganda, sandwich programmes seldom undermine the potential for graduates to become powerful actors in Uganda. The sandwich model also differs from local PhD programmes that, while firmly embedded in local social and scientific networks, obliquely disempower students through their indirect dependence upon foreign funds and research interests.

Reflecting on his PhD training in Europe, Dr Oloya noted that one of the greatest rewards of his experience was the sense of empowerment that allowed him to see himself as an equal to his European colleagues. It was while studying overseas that he first realised 'Hey! I'm not stupid after all,' and allowed him to see himself as an expert when offering guidance to foreign colleagues from other countries and foreign institutions. As he explains:

When you talk about genetic sequencing and DNA technology, you say, 'Ah, that is core science, that it is very tough. We can't do it, it is for the Europeans, and it is for the Americans.' But through training abroad you realise 'OK, I can also do it'. And then the Europeans, the fellow students, they say, '[Oloya], I'm finding a problem here and here, how do you do solve it?' Then you go through this and you solve the problem. You say 'OK, I can also help somebody.' It gives you confidence. (interview, 13 May 2014)

For Oloya and others, this confidence was cultivated further by foreign supervisors who invited Ugandan PhD students into their home, personally served them a cup of coffee or tea, and asked them how they would tackle a research issue or encouraged them to pursue their own ideas. Several respondents compared this with their experiences of supervision in Uganda, which tend to reproduce existing hierarchies and favour obedience above independence. Of course, not all Ugandan students enjoy such warm relations with their foreign supervisors. However, to the extent that collegial relations and friendships do develop across geographic and political-economic spaces, supervisor– student relationships are demystified, and hierarchies begin to erode (albeit even partially), thus enabling Ugandan scientists to engage and negotiate more effectively with international collaborators.

Later, when PhDs have been completed and graduates are continuing with their careers, experiences abroad also help Ugandan researchers to understand and accommodate what might otherwise seem to be irrational behaviour on the part of their foreign collaborators. Dr Nalwanga, for example, described her foreign colleagues' loss of confidence on encountering what to them were shocking research conditions in a Ugandan hospital's maternity ward:

They said: 'you mean a woman can deliver on the floor? … How do we go and talk to such a woman to participate in a research project? … How will we conduct research in a centre which delivers a hundred [babies] per day, when in our centre [in Europe] we have a hundred per month? How will we be able to take the samples? How are we going to counsel [the women]?' … They said all those kinds of things. But to me these things are normal. I've done research [in such contexts]. (interview, 28 April 2014)

Having trained in their country through a sandwich PhD programme, Dr Nalwanga knows the environments that European researchers are more familiar with. She has experienced the clean hallways, ample beds and basic comforts of European hospitals, just as she has experienced conditions in regional public hospitals in Uganda. Her experience has enabled her to assist and advise her foreign colleagues, and to facilitate the continuation of their scientific work. She explained that foreign partners often

don't know much about the local setting, and it is up to us to really tell them the true picture. [And] it matters! Otherwise some of them, at one point, feel like they are exploiting patients. They are like, 'how do we come then and take all these samples for DNA analysis … when a women can't even feed herself?' (interview, 28 April 2014)

For Dr Nalwanga, the conditions in which her research is conducted is one of the reasons why her research matters. Like many of her colleagues, she was once a doctor working at a hospital with few medical resources, and treating a seemingly never-ending queue of individual patients with frighteningly advanced medical conditions. What was, for her, the depressing prospect of spending her career reacting to individual cases without being able to effect systemic change in terms of preventative healthcare was one of the factors that motivated her to pursue a career in clinical research. Through her research, which is carried out in collaboration with foreign partners and using foreign funds, Dr Nalwanga is hopeful that she might be able to help mitigate future suffering rather than merely reacting to avoidable and preventable medical emergencies. Dr Nalwanga believes that her experience abroad makes her a more effective support to her foreign partners, whose funds and equipment are essential to the success of her research.

While Dr Nalwanga's example is dramatic, others are more amusing. Dr Tumushabe recalled a flushed and frustrated Scandinavian researcher in a northern Ugandan town who stood in the street demanding a receipt from a *boda boda* [motorcycle taxi] driver:

If you only studied here in Uganda, then you would be wondering 'is he crazy, looking for a receipt from a *boda boda*?' [*laughing*]. Yet, the *boda* driver is taking your money. Maybe he has worked with you the whole day and you are going to pay him 30 000 shillings. That is a lot of money. Money you cannot receive later [without a receipt]. So, [training abroad and] learning among those environments helps you to know how to respond to and understand a different culture in the future. Scandinavian people are strict [*chopping the side of one hand against the palm of his other*]. If you have been with them, you won't wonder why they are irritated, why they are not renewing your project [when you can't show receipts for some project costs]. (interview, 1 May 2014)

The *boda boda* story is comical, but it also highlights two serious issues. First, foreign collaborators' concerns and actions sometimes make little sense in a Ugandan context. Second, understanding those actions and their implications can be important for the sustainability of future research and collaboration opportunities.

Understanding partners' and funders' perceptions of the legitimate costs involved in a research project and of how those costs should be accounted for, is fundamental to building trust in international collaborations. Only after spending months in Scandinavia, getting to know Scandinavian researchers, their research environments, and their version of audit culture (Power 1994), does a sweaty argument with a *boda boda* driver make any sense. In the long run, being able and/or willing to try to make sense of the underlying assumptions inherent in such encounters is a skill that helps make transnational collaborations sustainable in contexts where very research might otherwise seem impossible.

## **Conclusions**

The research-training programmes described here are elements within a larger transnational economy of scientific knowledge production whereby labour, equipment, data and access to empirical material are exchanged between local and foreign actors and institutions. While some foreign institutional and individual partners might engage with Southern researchers for altruistic reasons, significant material and symbolic rewards are available to foreign actors who engage with the Southern science community. Many Northern scientific careers, commercial innovations, and medical breakthroughs rely on access to the plants, animals, viruses and social and physical processes that are only, or most easily, accessible in the South. Meanwhile, in the securitised North, where low-income countries are viewed as potentially destabilising sources of disease, refugees and environmental pollution, access to and expertise about these countries is a priority for wealthy governments seeking to neutralise or curtail such threats.

Despite occasional periods of political tumult and violence, Uganda has long been an attractive research site for scientists from Europe and North America. It has offered (and continues to offer) a welcoming political, social and physical climate in tropical Africa with access to plants, animals, bacteria, viruses and human bodies that are the essential raw material for much Northern research (Elliott et al. 2015; Tilley 2011). By offering foreigners access to such material, Ugandans can garner rewards such as funding, equipment, access to training opportunities abroad, and foreign expertise. These resources have the potential to contribute to the renewal and development of research capacity, enabling Ugandans to carry out scientific research and to speak with increasing authority in both local and international fora. Meanwhile, the rising number of highly trained researchers in Uganda, combined with the growing influence of local institutional review boards and the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, permit local researchers to demand more meaningful and beneficial collaborations in exchange for allowing foreign researchers and institutions access to Ugandan sites.

Both historical and contemporary evidence shows that scientists in lower-income countries are able to wield influence and agency in (and sometimes against) foreign actors from the North (Lowe 2004; Osseo-Asare 2014; Pollock 2014; Prince and Marsland 2014; Rottenburg 2009b; Tilley 2011; Zink 2013). However, the balance of power between research collaborators still obviously favours actors in the wealthier countries (Crane 2013; Droney 2014; Olukoshi and Zeleza 2004; Tousignant 2013). Both my own informants, and the publications of a diverse group of scholars (see, for example, Elliott et al. 2015; Juma and Yee-Cheong 2005; Osseo-Asare 2014), seem to agree that it is important and necessary for African scientists to foreground their own priorities for science research in Africa. In my view, opportunities for scientists from low-income countries to participate in sandwich research training programmes are clearly an asset in this struggle.

In comparing the three different models of PhD training that are available to Ugandan scientists, Dr Mugisa succinctly encapsulated the perspective of most of the scientists I encountered in my investigation:

I think if you compare the three modes: the one at home, which now tends to create capacity but over a long period of time, and also does not create capacity with a richness of experiences. Then you have the sandwich programme, which shortens the length of stay on the programme but then with a very high probability of people coming back to their stations. Then the other one where you have probably even a shorter stay on the programme, but chances of fleeing the station, people not coming back. I think the one that we really would prefer is the sandwich programme up until the capacity at home is grown – the capacity to supervise, the infrastructure, and the resources. (interview, 5 May 2014)

Dr Mugisa points to the richness of experience and the likelihood of return as key factors informing his preference. His emphasis on the importance of scholars returning to their 'stations' might surprise observers who see the 'brain drain', and the constant flow of people from resource-poor to richer research environments, as a natural phenomenon. However, his view resonates with my observations of, and conversations with, scientists in Uganda, who frequently pointed out the beauty of their country and the value they place on being at home.

I found a consensus in Uganda that the sandwich model of training offers Ugandan scientists opportunities to strengthen their positions in Uganda's scientific community and in society more generally. These programmes also provide opportunities for Ugandan scientists to improve their positions in relation to international partners and counterparts. Given that Uganda's research environments are, and will in all likelihood continue to be, co-productions between actors and actants from both inside and outside Uganda (as well as inside and outside of science) (Latour 1987), the power of Ugandan scientists to act as strong agents is strengthened, not weakened, by their exposure to multiple scientific and cultural contexts.

These insights should also serve as a caution to institutions that would like to accelerate the shift towards local PhD training models, based on the growing number of qualified and experienced scientists in low-income countries. In my view, PhD training opportunities in the South should continue to expand to the extent that they can derive resources from international collaborations that are primarily *scientific* in nature (as opposed to those focused on capacity building), and to the extent that national governments direct funds to their own PhD training programmes. A shift to a full-time local model by international actants supporting science capacity building has the potential to erode the agency of scientists if it takes place before the following conditions are met in lower-income countries:

can access the reagents and other consumable resources that research depends on.

These conditions are not yet met in Uganda or in most sub-Saharan African countries. As such, the sandwich model, through its co-produced, multi-local and liminal learning and research environment is better suited to the goals of institutions that aim to strengthen the agency of scientists who are working in lower-income countries.

Lastly, it is important to acknowledge that the costs and values associated with the three models differ widely. The costs of full-time training programmes abroad are high while their value for science in Uganda is relatively low, given that so few of their recipients return home. Meanwhile, if we apply the narrow models of financial accounting that have become normative in understanding value in contemporary audit culture, the sandwich model may seem prohibitively expensive when compared to local PhD programmes. Sandwich PhDs entail high salary costs for foreign supervisors, as well as airfares and living stipends for students in high-income countries. However, the actor-network theory approach used here highlights the value of various kinds of relationships, knowledges, skills and hands-on experience with modern scientific equipment, that are commonly externalised in conventional calculations of the return on investment from the different training models. My findings indicate that these elements of PhD training are precisely the ones that become key assets for Ugandan scientists as they attempt to further decolonise science in their country. Consequently, until local research environments are further improved, a substantive economic calculation of value clearly favours sustained investment in sandwich models of PhD training.

## **Notes**

## **References**

Latour, Bruno (1990) Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together. In: Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds) *Representation in Scientific Practice*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

# CHAPTER 4

# The status of research at three Ugandan universities

*ABK Kasozi*

In this chapter, I review research at three Ugandan universities. My main focus is Makerere University in Kampala but I also make some observations about the Mbarara University of Science and Technology and the Uganda Christian University in Mukono. I argue that although Makerere University has achieved some impressive results in research, the lack of local funding, an unfriendly legal framework, inadequate research-management systems, and an overemphasis on teaching at the expense of research, are undermining its struggling research capacity. This study shows that micro-level co-operation between academic staff and institutions of the North and the South should supplement, and eventually overtake, African universities' existing agreements with large multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, UNESCO, the OECD, ISESCO and so on. Such co-operation will enhance the research function of African universities.

## **Understanding the background**

Most of Africa's universities were established to train a handful of the more obedient local elites as civil servants so that they could be relied on to keep the colonial system's administrative and economic systems running smoothly. Higher education has therefore always been, and still is, elitist.

The role of African universities did not change as the continent achieved political independence. Between 1960 and 1980, African universities remained 'development institutions', designed to produce the workforce that African countries needed for state administration (Yesufu 1973; see also the Accra Declaration). Research was never emphasised, and even teaching staff were able to access only the bare minimum in terms of equipment, books and facilities. From the 1970s to the 2000s, many African states weakened to the point of collapse (Harrison 2004), and years of mismanagement by military and authoritarian regimes seriously undermined Africa's universities. Most universities lost any autonomy they might have hoped to win with the ending of colonialism; nationalisation turned most of them into government institutions and they began to be governed as state departments.

When multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF imposed their conditionalities on collapsing African states from the 1980s onwards, the accompanying neoliberal policies further undermined African universities. Based on a theory that rates of return on higher education were lower than those from basic education, and that higher education primarily benefited private and not public interests (Psacharopoulous 1980; Psacharopoulos et al. 1986), African countries were encouraged to spend less on higher education. The World Bank considerably reduced its own spending on higher education in Africa (Banya and Elu 2001; Carrol 2005; Kasozi 2009). In 2008, the World Bank noted that its 'official development assistance to postsecondary education averaged just US\$110 million a year between 1990 to 1999' and that its 'financing for tertiary education on the continent, which had averaged US\$103 million annually from FY90–FY94 declined to US\$30.8 million per year from FY95–FY99' (World Bank 2008: 1, 2). African governments were encouraged to view higher education as a luxury and enormous budget cuts to higher education spending drastically weakened universities in a number of African countries. From 1980 to 2002, public expenditure per student fell from US\$6 800 to \$1 200, and by the mid 2000s, it had dropped to a per student average of \$981 in 33 sub-Saharan African countries (World Bank: 2008: xxvii).

The funding cuts dealt a major blow to research and knowledge production in universities, and by 2008, the continent's academics were contributing less than 3 per cent of articles published in international journals (Paul Zeleza quoted in Cloete et al. 2015: 8). In Uganda, from 1985 to 2005, the Ministry of Education allocated an average of between 9 and 11 per cent of its budget to higher education, and over 60 per cent to basic education.1 The Ugandan government still sees universities primarily as teaching institutions, and has barely funded research since the mid 1990s. In the 2014/2015 financial year, research at Ugandan universities was allocated just 420 million shillings (about US\$210 000) in state funding.2

It is clear therefore that the education policies of the World Bank and other multilateral financial institutions have had disastrous consequences for African institutions of higher learning. While advancing their own ideological agendas, these macro-level 'same-size-fits-all' policies have neither emphasised the knowledge production function of universities nor have they facilitated the production of the next generation of academics in Africa.

## **The urgency of research and knowledge**

So, how can Southern institutions support one another to enhance research and knowledge accumulation while working with their Northern counterparts? Can collaboration between North and South at institutional and faculty levels enhance research capacity in the South and give both Southern and Northern collaborators greater insight into global problems?

In this information age, knowledge plays a key role in development (World Bank 2000, 2002, 2006, 2008). Human societies need knowledge to manage all their activities and resolve problems that arise. Higher education institutions, particularly universities, are major sites of knowledge production. Because of this, universities should be at the centre of any country's innovation system (this includes public and private research centres funded by industry and commerce). But universities do not only produce knowledge, they also pass on knowledge to the next generation, award academic and professional qualifications, recruit social elites and diffuse dominant ideologies into society (Castells 2001; see also Cloete et al. 2015). Unfortunately, African universities have never fully carried out their knowledge-creation functions effectively for a number of reasons, some of which I discuss briefly in the sections that follow.

## *Gaps in the creation of home-grown knowledge*

Ideally, collaboration between North and South, at the inter-faculty, inter-institutional or bilateral-agency levels should advance homegrown knowledge. Instead, multilateral agencies tend to draw up blueprints of knowledge for emulation and implementation by weaker Southern partners. These blueprints are often loaded with cultural and ideological content generated by the major powers.

The importing of these conceptual models that are allegedly 'universally applicable' is one of the major causes of slow development in Africa (Okolie 2003). African farmers, for example, tend to embrace only those agricultural technologies that are not contrary to their beliefs or ways of life, and which are affordable, safe and sustainable. However, most of what is taught in our agricultural faculties and colleges is based on Western agricultural practices. These assume that mechanised, large-scale commercial farming is the ultimate goal, despite its high costs, and disastrous social and environmental impacts. For this reason, most African academics agree that scholars who have knowledge and experience of African conditions must produce Africacentred knowledge.

Researchers and teachers in African universities should be trained in the environments they are likely to work in if they are to appreciate the problems they will be called upon to resolve. In this way, they will ask the right questions when confronted with problems for resolution. Due to the lack of funding, homegrown researchers and supportive research environments, most of what is taught in African universities is imported. Virtually all the knowledge quoted in the Science Citation Index is produced in developed countries. No wonder Africa remains peripheral in terms of knowledge production (Altbach 2002, 2003). Although African-produced academic articles rose from 1 250 in 1996 to 5 200 in 2006, this still comprised only about 2.3 per cent of global output (Musiige and Maassen 2015). Clearly, this is an area where improvement is needed and collaboration is feasible.

## *Too little funding for research*

How can African scholars co-operate to lobby governments to fund research as a major function of universities? Most African leaders see universities as teaching institutions and therefore do not sufficiently fund knowledge production. Yet, poor funding is a key reason for the lack of research outputs from sub-Saharan Africa. From 2008 to 2012, most developing nations spent the equivalent of 3 to 4 per cent of their country's total GDP on research and development. In the same period, African countries spent the equivalent of less than 1 per cent of their (much smaller) GDPs on 'mainstream science-based' research (Sanyal and Varghese 2006; Teferra and Altbach 2003). Uganda performs even worse than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to funding research. In 2007, the country spent the equivalent of 0.41 per cent of its GDP on research and development and relied on external funding for a good percentage of its research expenditure (Cloete et al. 2015: 151).

Looking back to how this came about, Mamdani has reported that, in 1993, 'both the [Makerere] University and the government suspended research funding' (2007: 131). Although the government then allocated 300 million shillings (about US\$3 million at the time) towards research in its 1994/1995 budget, general state policy was to do away with research funding. In December 1996, the 'government scrapped scholarships for graduate studies' (Mamdani 2007: 131) and linked all further training to public staffing requirements. This meant that government funding for all other types of research – including basic research, applied research, strategic research, and the training of a national cadre of highly skilled researchers at universities – was scrapped. According to statistics supplied by the Ministry of Education for the period 2000 to 2007, basic research was not funded.3 Fortunately reasonable funding from donors helped to fill part of the vacuum.

## *Issues of institutional autonomy*

How should university autonomy be understood, and how do different types of autonomy influence the way research is done? A major obstacle to expanding and enhancing research at Makerere and other Ugandan universities is the lack of institutional autonomy and academic freedom. In Uganda, universities have passed through various stages, being: institutions for training African colonial functionaries (1948– 1963); regional and independent universities (1963–1970); national institutions governed from the Ministry of Education (1970–2001); and semi-autonomous institutions with key management areas still controlled by the state (since 2001). The Universities and Tertiary Institutions Act of 2001 granted Ugandan universities some freedoms, but they remain stifled in many ways. For example, section 6A of the Act (as amended in 2006) states:

The Minister may issue directives of a policy nature to all institutions of higher education, whether public or private, and the institutions shall give effect to those directives.

Accordingly, although, under section 41, university councils have powers to 'fix scales of fees and boarding charges', the government prevented Makerere University's council from increasing fees in the 2004/2005 academic year and again in 2014. In addition, section 62(3) of the Act forbids public universities from spending any money not approved by the Ugandan parliament, and section 59(5) states that no public university has the right to invest any of its funds without approval of the minister of education. The Treasury can also ask public universities to remit monies collected to the government under section 44(4) of the Public Finance and Accountability Act. All these legal restrictions means that universities in Uganda, particularly public universities, have no power to freely manage their finances, and therefore cannot accumulate funds for academic or research purposes.

## **Types of research conducted at Ugandan universities**

Research activities in Ugandan universities can be classified into six broad categories. A few staff and students do the critically important basic or *disinterested research* conducted solely with the aim of searching for truth. However, research with immediate practical outcomes for implementation is preferred. The majority of academics and institutions therefore seek out and conduct a*pplied research* with the aim of resolving specific social or scientific problems.

Makerere and Mbarara universities are involved in a number of research projects that aim to find solutions to various medical, agricultural and social problems. The College of Agriculture at Makerere University has done pioneering work in its efforts to modernise agriculture, prevent animal and plant diseases and conserve the environment. The Mountains of the Moon University, in the town of Fort Portal in Central Western Uganda, conducts a number of research projects in horticulture and ecology.

Meanwhile public and chartered university institutions are permitted to train postgraduate students to carry out *training-based research,* to fulfil the requirements of masters and doctoral degrees. Virtually every academic in Uganda attempts to obtain *consultancies*, which sometimes bring new information to light. Both local and international issues are addressed, and the research is often carried out on behalf of businesses or NGOs. Perhaps the most sought after form of research is *donor-driven*. A number of foreign donor agencies have supported research in Uganda. Most donor-driven research has focused on social and scientific issues. In the process, new knowledge has been produced and academics have been trained. Many of the beneficiaries have been the applied science-based faculties that work in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, health and technology. External donors are, understandably, interested in funding areas that they consider important. Lastly, some academics conduct *publication-driven research* aimed at increasing their publication records with a view to promotion and academic advancement.

## **Research and research capacities**

Despite all the obstacles they face, Ugandan academics persist in conducting research, disseminating their results, and training postgraduate students. In this section, I focus on the status of research and research capacity at Makerere University and then briefly touch on two other higher education institutions. All three institutions have benefited from collaborating with universities and researchers from the North.

## *Makerere University*

Research capacity depends on qualified academic staff, adequate facilities, a friendly legal framework that gives institutions the freedom to conduct research, and a good graduate-training system. Makerere University was established as a training institution (Sicherman 2005). Not only has it stuck to this tradition but new universities have followed its example. The massification of tertiary education has made Makerere University's problems more acute by dramatically increasing the need for additional lecturers. As shown in Table 4.1, in the 2012/2013 academic year, Uganda had only 973 PhD graduates, but in the same year over 200 000 students were registered to study at the country's 30 universities (UNCHE forthcoming).

In the 2012/2013 academic year, about 69 per cent of the country's PhD graduates were at, or associated with, Makerere University (see Table 4.2). That is, of the university's 1 585 academic staff, 640 or approximately 40 per cent had terminal degrees. Of the administrative staff, 23 had PhDs and another 12 non-administrative support staff also held this qualification.

The staff attrition rate at Makerere University increased when retirement was made mandatory for employees when they reach 60 years of age. Many seasoned academics were forced to leave and the university was unable to replace them with people of similar calibre. Of late, however, professors aged between 60 and 70 can be hired on contract, but this issue is being debated and had not been finalised when this chapter was written. Competition from smaller universities, as well as from the public and private sectors, is also having an impact on

*Source:* UNCHE (forthcoming)

reducing the proportion of senior staff at Makerere. In 2014, for example, the university's academic staff dropped from 1 585 to 1 447.

### *Postgraduate training*

Despite having attracted the highest number of the country's PhD graduates, Makerere's facilities in terms of book-to-student ratios, internet access, library space, classroom space, laboratory facilities and administrative infrastructure, are not particularly conducive to research. Nevertheless, the training of the next generation of academics at doctoral level is integral to higher-education-based research, and contributes to the vibrancy of the research culture at any university. One area of collaboration that can, and I think it has, benefited both North and South is the training of doctoral students at Northern institutions, as long as Southern students continue to have study periods and assignments in the local environments in which they will be expected to work after they have graduated. Makerere University has benefited from such collaboration, and a number of postgraduates have received financial and intellectual assistance from institutions from abroad. Table 4.3 lists the numbers of doctoral students who graduated

#### **Table 4.2: Qualifications of academic, administrative and support staff at Makerere University, January 2014**

*Data source:* Obtained from Makerere University's administrative staff linked to colleges, department and research units

from Makerere University between 2008 and 2014. Several of these had dual registration at Makerere and an overseas institution. Immersion in a local area helps students learn to ask relevant questions and helps them to frame their conclusions appropriately, while visiting overseas institutions helps students to appreciate global issues and problems and broadens their experience of academic study.

*Data source:* Senate Graduation Books

### *Research output*

From 2005 to 2012, Makerere University made significant strides in terms of disseminating its research results. With increased foreign funding, Makerere's research outputs, in the form of publications and doctoral theses, increased tremendously, accounting for over 70 per cent of Uganda's publication output (Cloete et al*.* 2015: 116). Table 4.4 gives the picture.

In an assessment of Africa's 'flagship' universities published by Cloete et al. in 2015*,* Makerere University was ranked second to South Africa's University of Cape Town in terms of research and publication output for the period 2007 to 2011, and first in terms of international co-operation for the period 2006 to 2012. However, in spite of this success, there are four major weaknesses that Makerere and its stakeholders must resolve if the institution is to maintain and improve its knowledge-production function.

Firstly, the institution is dependent on external funding for these activities. Figure 4.1 shows some of the donors that funded research

*Data source:* Directorate of Quality Assurance, Makerere University

via the university from 2000 to 2012. By 2013, 80 per cent of the US\$85 million available for research funding came from foreign donors (Musiige and Maassen, 2015: 122). In my view, there is nothing wrong with foreign funding. Many universities in the North *and* South obtain foreign funding that opens the door to opportunities that any university should be happy to receive. It is, however, unsustainable for any university to rely *primarily* on external funding because these funds are affected by several variables that the universities cannot control. Donors' priorities change, diplomatic relations with donor governments can be unpredictable, and strict conditions or forms of soft manipulation can be imposed on recipients. Makerere University urgently needs to develop a strategy for sustaining its research output and ensuring that it has funding sources that can be depended on if donors decide to close their taps.

Secondly, Makerere is still mainly an undergraduate teaching institution. By late 2014, undergraduate students made up more than 80 per cent of total enrolment, and staff could not handle the teaching load effectively. Further, too few staff are qualified to teach postgraduates. With just 675 (43 per cent) of staff holding PhDs, 57 per cent of the academic staff were qualified to teach undergraduates only. They could supervise neither doctoral students nor carry out serious research. Table 4.5 highlights this problem in more detail.

As shown in Table 4.5, most programmes, especially those in the College of Arts and Humanities, were oversubscribed and understaffed. Only the Colleges of Health Science, Natural Science and Veterinary Science met the National Council for Higher Education's benchmarks

## **Figure 4.1:** Research funding given to Makerere University by donors, 2000–2012

*Note:* PHEA = Partnerships for Higher Education in Africa; UNCST = Uganda National Council for Science and Technology; MSI = Millenium Science Initiative of the UNCST; DFID = Department for International Development, UK; IDRC = International Development Research Centre; CDC = Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; USAID = US Agency for International Development

*Data source:* Directorate of Quality Assurance, Makerere University

for staff-to-student ratios. It is no coincidence that faculties and colleges that are less crowded publish more research than the overcrowded ones. For example in 2012, the faculties related to science and technology produced more than 90 per cent of Makerere's research output (2 164 compared to 58 for Business, Humanities and Education combined, as shown in Table 4.4). This was also true in 2010 and 2011.

Thirdly, the management of research at Makerere, as in most Ugandan universities, is disorganised. After experiencing much frustration while trying to obtain data from various academic units at the university, my research assistant noted that, 'There is no central office that records and documents research projects and the publications of

#### **Table 4.5: Undergraduate student/staff statistics at Makerere University, December 2014**

*Note:* Makerere University is divided into a number of colleges on its main campus, and has two up-country campuses, one at Fort Portal to the west and one at Jinja to the east.

*Sources:* UNCHE (forthcoming) and the Directory of Quality Assurance, Makerere University

staff at unit or departmental levels.' (Two exceptions to this are described in the next section of the chapter.)

Lastly, the creation of Makerere University's college system was rushed. The roles of the colleges and the faculties in relation to academic departments are not properly defined. In most universities, departments are hives of research and teaching activities, the recipients of research and innovation funding and the distributors of privileges and sanctions. But these roles were blurred when the colleges were established as a kind of superstructure above the departments and faculties. As a result, deans of faculties and principals of colleges struggle to manage their academic and financial affairs. To sustain even the modest momentum attained in research activities to date, Makerere's researchers and administrators must improve their management of this important university function.

## **Research at other universities in Uganda**

In Uganda, public and chartered private universities are permitted to offer graduate programmes. As part of a broader research project, I surveyed 15 tertiary institutions (see Appendix 1 for a full list of Uganda's tertiary institutions). Most had similar problems to those experienced at Makerere University. However, due to the lack of staff and facilities, some had begun to 'churn out' improperly trained doctoral candidates. In 2012, for example, the Uganda National Council for Higher Education (UNCHE) used its powers to ask one institution to review more than 40 PhD degrees that it had planned to award in one academic year!4 Nevertheless, I identified two institutions – Mbarara University of Science and Technology and the Uganda Christian University – that I think organised and managed their research functions slightly better than Makerere University, although their outputs were relative to their respective sizes. Although both institutions are much smaller in terms of enrolment and infrastructure, they have laid good foundations for the management of research. Both institutions have created elaborate mechanisms for collaborating with international academics and research institutions, and some of their staff and students benefit from these collaborations. These two university institutions are briefly reviewed below.

## *Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST)*

MUST's research efforts are well organised. Its Centralized Institutional Research Innovations and Management Office (CIRIMO) co-ordinates effectively with units (departments) that report directly to faculties or institutes. In addition, the university has a *Grants Management Manual*, a strategic plan for research, and a 'Research Innovations, Management and Uptake Policy'. At the time of writing, MUST's research policy was being reworked and was expected to be approved shortly thereafter. In addition, the medical faculty has its own research administration office and its own strategic plans.

In the 2014/2015 financial year, MUST received 75 million shillings (US\$37 500) from the Ugandan government and 260 million shillings (US\$130 000) from non-taxable revenue for research – a total of 335 million shillings. This was distributed to the institution's five faculties as follows: Faculty of Medicine, 85.5 million shillings (US\$42 750); Faculty of Science, 85.5 million shillings (US\$42 750); Institute of Computer Science, 55 million shillings (US\$27 500); Institute of Management Science, 55 million shillings (US\$27 500); and Institute of Interdisciplinary Training and Research, 50 million shillings (US\$2 500).

The university also obtained funding from a number of state agencies and foreign governments including the National Institute of Health, the Center for Global Health, the European Union, the United Nations (through World Vision), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenge Canada, VLIR-UOS (for the Belgian government), Google, the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as from the governments of Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, the US and others.

What is impressive is that the university spent 335 million shillings (US\$167 000)(about 4 per cent) of its annual budget of 7 810 million shillings (US\$4 million) on research in the 2014/2015 financial year.

MUST does not have its own publishing unit, but certain faculties have plans to start publishing their own journals. Researchers for the Institute for Tropical Forest Conservation, a semi-autonomous postgraduate research institute linked to the university have published work in highly regarded ISI journals such as *Conservation Biology*, *Oryx*, *Forest Ecology and Management* and *The Lancet*, among others.

MUST also collaborates in various ways with a number of institutions nationally and internationally. These include: Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Calgary, the University of California San Francisco, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of British Colombia, MUST Bogoye, Case Western Reserve University, Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, Ghent University, Oxford University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Moi University, Makerere University, Gulu University, Busitema University and Kampala International University (Western Campus).

All five of MUST's faculties prepare students for bachelors, masters and PhD degrees. In addition, research teams of staff and students undertake non-degree-related research through MUST's Epicentre Research Base. Meanwhile, the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) aims to accelerate innovations in medical technology and build entrepreneurial capacity to improve health in low-and middle-income countries.5

## *Uganda Christian University, Mukono*

Alumni of the Uganda Christian University have an excellent reputation among employers in Uganda. That the university has begun to put a modest research infrastructure in place is evident from the following:

The university's research infrastructure includes the new Ham Mukasa Library, which has good ICT facilities and dedicated staff. The shortage of terminal degree holders in Uganda is, however, hampering the institution's efforts to train its staff and enrol larger cohorts of postgraduate students.

## **Conclusions**

Although Uganda's higher education sector is both cash-strapped and legally disempowered, research activities are still taking place at several of the country's tertiary institutions. However, most Ugandan universities see themselves mainly as teaching institutions, and do not aim to produce substantial new knowledge. University management teams tend to perceive their institutions primarily as places of teaching, and seem to see research as a lower priority. In my view, co-operation between national, regional and international institutions is needed to advance the basic notion that knowledge production *should be* a major function of *all* universities.

As relative latecomers to the establishment of universities, polytechnics and research centres as centres of knowledge creation, Africa must collaborate with regions and states that have nurtured such institutions for centuries. However, Africa needs homegrown thinkers who are able to use locally focused conceptual models to resolve local problems.

To avoid repeating mistakes made in the past, levels, types and methods of cross-regional co-operation must be carefully defined. Co-operation and relationships should hinge on the assumption that universities are primarily centres of knowledge creation and that good teaching is the *product* of quality research.

While, in the past, international and multilateral bodies allocated most of their resources to co-operation at a macro level, it is high time that more emphasis is placed on the micro levels of individuals, faculties and institutions, via country-specific and bilateral relationships. Unfortunately, even this form of co-operation is likely to remain unequal in terms of financial and intellectual resources. The North tends to have more of both than the South. To remedy this, the South must take

responsibility for funding their own research and teaching institutions. The South must nurture their own academics and develop local research capacities in their universities and other research institutions. Donors cannot forever bear the burden of funding research in Africa's universities.

Defined co-operation can help African academics to devise ways of lobbying governments not only to increase funding, but also to free universities from government-imposed red tape. For now, in a number of countries in the South, universities' research efforts are crippled by their lack of funding and an absence of institutional autonomy. Yet, the need to improve the knowledge production function of universities in the South remains (Cloete et al. 2015).

In my view, it is better to train doctoral students in their native environment if they are to participate in resolving local problems. In addition, while the South needs to increase its numbers in this area, it is important to acknowledge that students from the North gain much from study trips to the South and from consulting Southern academics.

The following are key areas that must be addressed:

As shown, the universities of Makerere and Mbarara and the Uganda Christian University have begun conducting reasonable amounts of new research in a small set of disciplines; however, their ability to continue to do so is threatened by unstable funding regimes and a lack of autonomy in key areas of financial management. In addition, the mismanagement of research activities, a lack of qualified academic staff and the absence of a well-structured programme for training the next generation of academics, pose serious threats.

## **Appendix 1: Accredited universities in Uganda in 2012/2013**

## **Appendix 2: Other degree-awarding institutions in Uganda**

*Note:* This category of institutions was created by the Universities and Other Tertiary Institutions (Amendment) Act of 2006. Since the Act was passed, one public and four private institutions have been licensed. Among these, the Ernest Cook Ultrasound Research and Education Institute, located at Mengo Hospital in Kampala, specialises in medical research, while the other three offer business management programmes. These institutions account for approximately 2 per cent of students enrolled at higher education institutions. *Source:* UNCHE

## **Notes**

## **References**

# CHAPTER 5

# Undoing the effects of neoliberal reform: The experience of Uganda's Makerere Institute of Social Research

## *Mahmood Mamdani*

I did my O levels at Old Kampala Secondary School in 1962, the year of Uganda's independence. In that year, the US government gave an independence gift to the Ugandan government, which included 24 scholarships. I was one of those airlifted to the US where I obtained several degrees over ten years. I returned in 1972.

Those who were given scholarships can be divided into two: those who never returned and those who did. Those who did were soon frustrated by the fact that the conditions under which they were supposed to work were so far removed from those in which they had been trained. Material amenities and infrastructure were minimal, as was a political and research environment conducive to intellectual work. Within a matter of years, sometimes months, many of those who returned began looking for jobs overseas, or moved out of academia into government or business or elsewhere.

I draw one lesson from this experience: the model does not work. It focused on selecting bright young high-school graduates for training oversees and assumed that, on our return, we would function as so many individual change agents or 'modernisers'. Today, academics in African universities must instead train postgraduate students in the institutions in which they will have to work. The next generation of African scholars, or at least most of them, must be trained at home. This means that issues of institutional reform have to be tackled alongside those of postgraduate study, so that postgraduate education, research and institution-building form part of a single integrated whole.

I would like to put this in the context of the history of higher education in Africa. Rather than claim a single African history, I contrast the older colonies, such as South Africa and Egypt, with countries, such as Uganda, that were colonised after the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885. In the older colonies, Britain embarked on a 'civilising' mission (building schools and universities), whereas after the Berlin Conference, the colonial powers tended to regard the products of modern education as likely to subvert colonial rule.

## **The history of higher education in Africa**

The history of higher education in Africa began over a millennium ago. It is well known that centres of learning existed in different parts of Africa – such as at Al-Azhar in Egypt, at Al-Zaytuna in Tunisia and at Sankoré in Mali – prior to Western domination of the continent. And yet, this is of marginal significance when it comes to understanding contemporary higher education institutions in Africa, which are so rooted in our colonial experience. The fact that knowledge production is everywhere based on a disciplinary mode developed in Western universities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is testimony to this.

Britain and other Western powers colonised the African continent in successive phases. The northern and southern parts of the continent were the first to be colonised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As noted, the British initially thought of colonialism as a 'civilising mission'; the schools and universities they built were hallmarks of this. By the early twentieth century, however, when they were colonising the lands between the Sahara and the Kalahari, the British authorities had become far more concerned with maintaining order and power, while extracting raw materials and exporting their own rural poor, than with 'civilising' or 'developing' the lands they ruled.

Centuries of colonial experience – particularly in India – had taught the British that education can be double-edged. Thus, while teaching people to read and write and reflect might make them more productive, the risk is that their thinking is less easily controlled. In the older colonies, the educated elites were the first to demand independence. When denied this, the same elites began to organise the broader populations. This gave us the nationalist movement. Frederick Lugard, who headed British colonial missions in Uganda (from 1890 to 1892) and in Nigeria (from 1900 to 1906), wrote that Britain must avoid 'the Indian disease' in Africa, by which he meant that 'the natives' must not be educated (Lugard 1965).

It is unsurprising then that, by the 1960s, the whole of East Africa had just one university: Makerere; and the whole of Nigeria had only one university: Ibadan. This means that, unlike in South and North Africa, the universities that now exist in the lands south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo are products of nationalism, not colonialism. In this region, no African country could claim to be truly independent until it had, alongside its national flag, national anthem and national currency, a national university.

## **Nationalism and the university**

Everywhere, the development of universities was a key nationalist demand. Nigeria, for example, had one university and a thousand students at independence. By 1991, the country had 41 universities and 131 000 registered students (Bako 1993: 150). The figures for countries in East Africa are similar. And yet, the very nationalists who created the post-colonial universities soon came into conflict with the new institutions. There are two sides to this story. Nationalists are seldom democrats. This is true the world over. George Washington saw opposition as treason, so did Indira Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and even Julius Nyerere.

The African political world of the late 1960s and early 1970s was about single-party nationalism. In this single-party world, universities were the only institutions that were free to run campaigns and hold elections. Naturally, opposition thinkers gravitated to these universities. At the same time, university students saw themselves – as they still do – as the leaders of tomorrow, born to rule.

Recall the language student leaders used when describing their present and imagining their future: students were organised in 'guilds'; their leaders were called 'presidents'; presidents' assistants were called 'ministers'; and together they called themselves a 'cabinet'. For their part, the governments of the day saw such students as incubators of opposition – as both actual and potential political threats. No longer just hubs for producing knowledge, post-colonial universities turned into so many political nuclei. When governments silenced dissent at such universities, it wasn't innovative research programmes that they saw as a threat, but the participation of students and academics in national politics.

In 1972, Makerere University celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Idi Amin came to address us. He arrived with a battalion of soldiers. He stood right in front of the Main Hall. Amin was blunt. Pointing to the battalion surrounding the square, he said: 'I brought the soldiers with me so when you lift your heads from your books, you know who has power.' And then he added, mischievously and meaningfully: 'On my way, I stopped in Mulago [the University hospital] to look at your records. I saw that most of you are suffering from gonorrhoea. I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhoea in Uganda.'

If African governments saw activist students and staff as potential opponents, many students and academics saw themselves as ministers-in-waiting, some even as presidents-in-waiting. Thus, even when their language and critique was radical, their practice was elitist, and their elitist universities were in constant conflict with ruling parties. As a result, the governments began to run the universities as if they were parastatal organisations, forgetting that they are meant to be public institutions. It is no surprise that successive governments have treated the universities like so many water faucets; taps that can be turned on or off depending on political expediencies. Under such conditions, very little institutional planning worth the name is possible.

Like its sister campuses on the continent, Makerere University was an elitist and a colonial institution. Like the society of which it was part, Makerere was never intellectually independent. Before independence, it formed part of a colonial network that was subordinate to the University of London. After independence, this network soon became dominated by America, and held together by American funding organisations, mainly the Rockefeller Foundation. No matter how elitist it became, however, Makerere University was never seen as fit to run itself. Nor was it ever expected to become a research institution. Few departments had postgraduate programmes, as it was assumed that postgraduate work would be done in Britain or America.

Yet, Makerere is proud of its colonial legacy, thinking of itself as the 'Harvard of Africa'. If Makerere was ever this, it was a colonised Harvard. Harvard is a research university in two senses of that term. First, it is a site of research; second, it produces researchers. Every research university has to grow its own timber (whether it then uses or exports this timber is a secondary question), and the key sites for growing researchers are university PhD programmes. Ask anyone at a research university to identify the heart of its research, its vital and dynamic centre, and they will point to their doctoral programmes. Research universities integrate research and teaching in a single, organic relationship.

Makerere University, at least the part of it that I am most familiar with, the College of Humanities and the Social Sciences, has never been a research institution. The example of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) illustrates my point. Established in 1948 as the East African Institute of Social Research, and renamed a decade later, MISR became known globally as a research site. But MISR never produced researchers. The assumption was that those undertaking research at MISR, whether non-Ugandans in the colonial period or Ugandans after independence, would be trained elsewhere.

## **Post-colonial visions**

Two different post-independence visions of the role of higher education can be identified. One was state-driven. An example of this was Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam, where I taught for six years in the 1970s. The downside of that experience was that the government tended to treat the university as a parastatal, and continually undermined academic freedom. The upside was the university's creation of a historically informed, inter-disciplinary, curriculum.

The second post-independence vision, which emerged later, was market-driven. Makerere University is a prime example of this. I spent nearly two decades at Makerere, from 1980 to 1996. During the 1990s, the university combined the policy of fee-paying students (privatisation) with the introduction of a market-driven curriculum (commercial-isation). The effects were contradictory: income from fees showed that it was possible to broaden higher education's financial base; commercialisation opened the door to a galloping consultancy culture.

Both visions had a common failing: neither developed a postgraduate programme. Over nearly three decades, I do not recall a single discussion on postgraduate education at either Dar es Salaam or Makerere. To reflect on this is to realise that everyone assumed that postgraduate education would happen elsewhere, through staff-development programmes at overseas 'centres of excellence'. This assumption was so deep-seated that it became part of academic common sense.

## *Neoliberal reform*

MISR is a part of the university's College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Faculty of Arts in the College has been noted for its enthusiastic and uncritical embrace of neoliberal reforms since 1990. Not surprisingly, most students at the university are enrolled in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The neoliberal project has transformed the life of both students and lecturers in the College.

I will borrow a Malthusian metaphor to make my point: the rise in student admissions at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences between 2000 and 2015 has been geometric, but the increase in the teaching staff and the physical facilities has been arithmetic. Lecture halls have burst at the seams, and tutorials have been discontinued.

Lecturers' lives have also changed dramatically. Payment varies depending on the number of hours they teach, with the result that the average teaching load resembles that of a secondary-school teacher. In addition, almost every activity has been monetised. Staff are paid an allowance to invigilate an examination or to mark a script, even to attend meetings (departmental, faculty, college or senate). Although not all meetings elicit a sitting or transport allowance, the general practice is that the higher your designation, the more eligible you are to receive such allowances. In 2012, Ugandan newspapers carried a story of millions that were paid out in allowances to the search committee for the post of vice-chancellor.1 In the neoliberal university, there is no such thing as good citizenship.

In the late 1980s, with the government seeing the university as a parastatal, the World Bank began to play a role. From the World Bank's viewpoint at that time, university education was not only elitist, but a luxury that countries such as Uganda could ill afford. Two conclusions flowed from this. One, the cost of university education should be paid mainly by the (elite) families of (elite) students, and not by the state. Two, the government should shift its focus from higher to primary education where the costs are much lower and the same amount of money can apparently benefit many more students.2

The logic was elegant but populist, and faulty. It has had disastrous consequences for higher education, not just in Uganda but everywhere it has been applied. The World Bank's argument has two main problems. First, primary schools cannot thrive without a thriving university system. Without the universities, who will train the primary school administrators and teachers? Who will design the curricula? Second, it is nonsense to think that higher education benefits only, or even mainly, those who teach, work or study in the tertiary sector. This is like arguing that a hydropower plant benefits only the plant's management and the workers; it ignores the millions whose factories and houses, offices and streets, are lit by the power it generates. The point is that every element of a country's infrastructure, whether it be a power plant, a road or a university, has a social benefit.

In the 1990s, with rapid development in East Asia, the World Bank realised its mistake. It has since changed its mind. It now preaches 'knowledge-led growth', but its converts in Uganda and elsewhere are lagging behind (as converts often do). That the World Bank has changed its mind does not mean it should shirk responsibility for its mistakes. The Bank claims to be a champion of the free market. Well, the first law of the market is that if you make a bad investment, you pay for it. The World Bank has a long history of making bad investments, but it is difficult to recall even one instance where this organisation has paid for its wrongdoings. Its default response has been to withdraw, leaving its clients to pay the bills – the bank has the luxury of not living by the rules it imposes on others.

## *Privatisation and commercialisation*

The World Bank's approach created three problems. First, it exacerbated the under-financing of Africa's public universities. The expectation was that students and their families would carry the costs of higher education via fee payments. Yet, the reality in most African countries is that cost-based fees would deny most citizens access to higher education, and governments have shied away from the political consequences of this. Moreover, it must be noted that nowhere in the world do universities cover most of their costs via fees. The bulk of their income comes from endowments bequeathed by wealthy donors or the public purse.

The second problem flowed from the first. The neoliberal solution to the financial crisis of Africa's public universities was to expand student enrolment. To enlist the support of the academic staff in this, Makerere University decided to let each unit keep the bulk of the fees paid by students, and allow the academic staff decide how to use this income. This created a division between different faculties, leaving those with high enrolments cash-heavy, and those with low enrolments cash-strapped. The more the university divided into 'wet' and 'dry' faculties, the greater the disparities between the 'top up' allowances given to academic and administrative staff, both between and within units. Gradually, the university began to fragment from within.

The third problem has been the spread of the consultancy culture. Essentially, poorly paid academics morphed their research work into consultancy contracts as a way of making ends meet. For consultants, research is all about finding answers to problems defined by a client – consultants tend to think of research as finding answers, not formulating questions. Consultancy culture has been further institutionalised through short courses in research methods that teach students to gather and process quantitative information, from which they can cull 'answers'.

In response to the conditions created by these three problems, intellectual life in many African universities has been reduced to the bare bones of classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance has to include transport and per diem allowances. All this is part of a larger process that I see as the 'NGO-isation' of the university. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style audio-visual presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzzwords has replaced lively debates.

Countering these problems calls for the building of a meaningful intellectual culture. To my knowledge, there is no model for this on the African continent today. It is something we must create. The old model looked for answers outside the problem, and it was utopian because it imposed externally formulated answers. A new model must look for answers within the parameters of the problem. For a start, we need to move beyond simply understanding the problems and begin to identify initiatives that seek to address the problems. In what follows, I describe two such initiatives at Makerere University: the first is an external programme introduced by the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA), and the second is an internal initiative developed at MISR.

## **The SIDA programme**

SIDA is Makerere's largest donor. Since the mid 2000s, it has poured millions of dollars into graduate education at Makerere. In 2008, SIDA commissioned a group of three Swedish researchers to evaluate their assistance to Makerere. They worked with a Ugandan research assistant, Nelson Kakande, and published their findings in 2010 (see Freeman et al. 2010).

The researchers asked the right kinds of questions, including, how do you develop a research agenda, and why does money *alone* not solve the problem? Nevertheless, they were unable to answer any of the questions posed. When compiling their report, the study team began by admitting its own limitations. The main limitation, they said, was lack of time. SIDA brought forward the timing of their visit to Uganda which gave them hardly any time to prepare for their visit. As a result, the team 'was not able to develop questionnaires, perform surveys, or collect data prior [to] the site visit, nor to seek perceptions from Makerere participants about the survey and interview results from Sweden during the Makerere site visit' (2010: 10). Among other things, the study thus suffered from a 'lack of data about activities and outputs of SIDA-funded graduate students and senior researchers/supervisors' (2010: 10). In my view, even if the team had been given more time and more data, no external evaluation was likely to answer these questions; it needed to be guided by an internal reflection.

## *How do you develop a research agenda?*

Developing 'research capacity' is the main objective of SIDA's assistance. As a small country surrounded by powerful neighbours in a rapidly globalising world, Sweden understands that independent research is indispensable to maintaining intellectual independence, and forms the basis of social, economic and political independence. That is, the Swedes understand that if you want to act independently, you have to develop the capacity to think independently.

To this end, the study team made three recommendations: 'indigenous development of research themes', the formation of 'research groups as foundations for continuing teamwork', and 'collaboration within and across disciplines and geographic boundaries' (2010: 38). They noted that the first is the most important. Why this emphasis on 'indigenous' development? Why not import research themes from esteemed foreign universities or ask foreign advisors to provide them? The simple fact is that a decent research agenda can only be formulated on the basis of an understanding of one's own reality. There is no recipe that can be shared. It has to be home grown. The first step towards intellectual independence for a research community is for it to develop its own research questions.

At the same time, no individual should ever develop research questions in splendid isolation. We all need the insights provided by peer-to-peer networks in all aspects of this work, from constituting research teams to holding seminars. These forums function as sites for internal debate and brainstorming. A question the SIDA study team asked but did not answer was: how can Makerere University play 'a stronger role in developing Uganda's research agenda?' (Freeman et al. 2010: 49).

## *What money alone cannot do*

A conundrum lies at the heart of the report. The team gave a comprehensive account of what has been achieved through increased funding. Pride of place went to the development of an elaborate research infrastructure: 'The enormous enhancement in *research infrastructure* (ICT, library, laboratories, and a Demographic Surveillance Site) has transformed the research environment' they said (2010: 35). And yes, all the necessary artefacts are in place –information and communications technology, a library, laboratories, demographic surveillance facilities, academic networks, publications, external collaboration and support, journals, even research groups.3 Only the live subject is not quite present. Certainly, the library has expanded, more journals are available, both as hard copies and online, yet the culture of reading is declining. The problem is deeper. Even as we rightly celebrate these advances in material infrastructure, we cannot ignore signs that the failure to address the human factor may result in perverse uses of these very material advances.

The study team identified three major limitations when it comes to the human factor. The *first* was managerial: 'starting "big" in a setting where resources are very limited and systems for managing grants and contracts across the university are very weak, increases risks of funds not being used for purposes intended and for inefficiency'. They warned against the temptation to start big noting that, 'bigger investments may hold promise for significant gain in research capacity, but at relatively high risk' (2010: 38). Needless to say, this is salutary advice.

The *second* problem has to do with thesis advisors: 'Overwhelmingly the most frequent complaint,' reported the study team, is 'delay by overcommitted Ugandan supervisors' (2010: 22). But this was a complaint to which the team had no response except to note: 'External funds have not and cannot resolve the "overload" dilemma for researchers or those operating the research infrastructure' (2010: 8).

Why can money alone not solve the 'overload' problem? Because no matter how much you pay professorial advisors, it will not change the fact that their days, like everyone else's, consist of just 24 hours. The only way to solve the problem is to increase the size of the pool of advisors. Instead, both SIDA and the evaluation team looked for a short-term solution: collaboration with Swedish academics:

Collaboration with Swedish university colleagues markedly enhanced supervision, publication in the science disciplines, and preparation of a new generation of research mentors for growing numbers of PhD and masters students, including increasing the proportion of women … (from 25% in 1990 to 46% in 2008). (2010: 7)

The result was also the introduction (or some may say cloning) of Swedish practices at Makerere. The 'adoption of doctoral committees, the option of published papers to meet the thesis requirement, public thesis defences, and exclusion of supervisors from examination committees' (2010: 7) are some examples. Will greater dependence on Swedish supervisors in the short run enhance the supervisory capacity of Makerere's academics in the medium term? Or will it give rise to other, unintended and unanticipated, problems?4

Some negative effects are already evident. If a student has both a Ugandan and a Swedish supervisor, how should each be remunerated? Equally or in line with remuneration practices in each country? There is no easy answer to this. To reconcile two unequal standards of remuneration, Swedish and Ugandan, is difficult. SIDA decided to remunerate Swedish supervisors using Swedish standards and Ugandan supervisors using Ugandan standards. This means, however, that a Swedish supervisor is paid 'about US\$22 000 per student, which is 'about twice the entire salary of a senior Ugandan supervisor' (Freeman et al. 2010: 23). Naturally, Ugandan supervisors resent this. As noted in the report, 'Supervisors were very concerned about disparities in rewards for supervision between Swedish supervisors and themselves' (2010: 23).

The *third* problem concerned the students themselves:

Supervisors highlighted differences in today's students, many of whom they say read few books and articles, instead taking content from more generic web sources, 'regurgitating', cutting and pasting to assemble papers, rather than engaging in more rigorous analysis preferable to the 'old timers' – unless guided, and pushed, by supervisors. (2010: 23)

How much of this can be dismissed as a generational divide and how much needs to be seen as evidence of the university's failure to develop a research culture? Supporting evidence comes from students themselves: 'some [PhD students] expressed serious reservations about presenting their work [in PhD seminars], out of concern that colleagues could appropriate their ideas' (2010: 22).5 What do you do when perceived solutions are turned on their heads? When some students fear their ideas may be stolen in seminars, and others use the internet as an alternative to reading books – indeed, as an easy way of stealing ideas, otherwise called plagiarism? How do you develop a reading culture among students?

The value of the SIDA evaluation is that it underlined the primacy of the human factor. Lack of money is a problem, but it is not the most important problem. More important than how much money we have is *how we use it.* If we fail to recognise this, throwing money at problems is more likely to exacerbate them than solve them.

## *Sustainability*

The greatest shortcoming of the SIDA evaluation is that it failed to place Swedish assistance to the graduate programme at Makerere in the larger context of Makerere's own development. As a result, it made recommendations that were mainly timidly managerial– confined to areas of oversight and implementation. In my view, implementing these recommendations would simply increase bureaucracy without addressing the heart of the problem.

As explained, the university's lack of research capacity needs to be located historically. The heart of the problem lies in how the university has been conceptualised through the two main phases of its history. In the colonial period, it was assumed that Makerere's teaching and research faculty would be trained elsewhere, preferably in the UK. Then the cash-strapped post-colonial university became an entry point for the World Bank, which put the institution through the grinder of market-oriented reform, the main consequence of which was to destroy the quality of teaching and undermine existing research capacity. Some parts of the university, such as the arts faculty, participated in this initiative enthusiastically, and were wrecked; the science faculty, which resisted the reform, emerged with the least damage. I have written about this elsewhere (see Mamdani 2007).

If history is important in understanding the onset of the problem, it is perhaps even more important to an understanding of why the problem keeps recurring.

## **The MISR initiative**

When I arrived at MISR in June of 2010, we had seven researchers, including myself. I began by meeting each one for an hour and asking what research they had done since joining the institute. The answers were a revelation: everyone seemed to do everything, or rather anything: at one point primary education, the next primary health, then roads, then HIV/AIDS, whatever was in demand! This was when I learnt to recognise the first side-effect of consultancy: consultants have no expertise. They can lay claim only to a way of doing things, of gathering data and writing reports. They are Jacks or Janes – or Musokes or Mirmebes – of all trades, and masters of none.

Even though consultancies were MISR's main focus, some research was happening. However, it was all externally driven – the result of demands made by European donor agencies that the European universities they support to conduct research on Africa must also 'partner with' African universities. Rather than giving rise to institutional partnerships and collaboration, this has led to individual local researchers being incorporated into externally driven research projects. Too often, this resembles an outreach programme far more than a partnership between equals.

I suggested to my colleagues that we prioritise upgrading the library. The size of our collection had actually decreased over the previous decade. MISR's ten-year strategic plan called for purchasing about a hundred books over the ten-year period. This pointed to the second side-effect of the consultancy culture: consultants don't read, not because they can't or are not interested – but because reading has become a luxury, an after-work activity. Most consultancies require one to read nothing more than field data and notes.

My colleagues and I discussed these consultancy-related issues in meeting after meeting, and came up with a two-fold response. Our short-term response was to begin a programme of seminars, two a month. This required every staff member to present a research proposal that surveyed the literature in their field, identified key debates and located their query within those debates. In addition, we agreed to meet as a study group, also twice a month. As part of this process, we prepared a list of key texts published in the social sciences and humanities over the previous forty years to read and discuss. For the long term, we decided to create a multi-disciplinary, coursework-based, PhD programme to train a new generation of researchers. In January 2011, we held a two-day workshop with scholars from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia to brainstorm the outlines of this programme. In the next section, I sum up the ideas generated at that workshop.

## *Reflections on postgraduate education in the humanities and social sciences*

The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what it means to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current historical context, and specifically in post-colonial Africa. What does it mean to teach humanities and social sciences in locations where the dominant intellectual paradigms are products, not of Africa's own experience, but of a particular Western experience that theorises specific aspects of Western history and is concerned, in large part, with extolling the virtues or expounding on the shortcomings of the Enlightenment? How can we teach this paradigm, knowing that, as it has spread to other parts of the world, it has done so mainly by submerging its own particular origins and specific local concerns in terms of (ostensibly universal) scientific objectivity and neutrality?

I have no problem with reading Enlightenment texts; in fact, I see this as vital. The problem is, if the Enlightenment is said to be an exclusively European phenomenon, then the story of the Enlightenment excludes Africa and most of the rest of the world. How can it then serve as the foundation of university education in Africa? The assumption is that there is a single model, and that this can be derived only from the dominant Western experience. Accepting this is to reduce research to no more than a demonstration that societies around the world either conform to or deviate from the one model. The tendency is to dehistoricise and decontextualise all discordant experiences, both Western and non-Western. The effect is to devalue original research and intellectual production in Africa. Thus the global market tends to relegate Africa to providing the raw material ('data') to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals increasingly turn into descriptive accounts of data collection and of the methods used to collate this data; collaboration is reduced to assistance. The result is a general impoverishment of both theory and debate.

The expansion and entrenchment of intellectual paradigms that stress quantification above all else has led to a peculiar intellectual dispensation in Africa today. The dominant trend is for research to be primarily positivist and quantitative, carried out to answer questions formulated outside the continent, not only in terms of location but also in terms of historical perspective. This trend is directly reinforced via the 'consultancy' model, and indirectly through the ways in which research funds are channelled and through other forms of intellectual disciplining.

From this point of view, the proliferation of short methodology courses that aim to teach students and academics the quantitative methods necessary to gather and process empirical data are ushering in a new generation of native informers. In addition, the collection of data to answer pre-packaged questions can never be a substantive form of research as it displaces the fundamental practice of formulating the research questions that are to be addressed. When this happens, however, researchers turn into managers who supervise data collection.

This challenge to autonomous scholarship is not unprecedented. Indeed, autonomous scholarship was similarly denigrated in the early post-colonial states, when universities were conceived of as providing the 'manpower' [sic] necessary for national development, and original knowledge production was seen as a luxury. Even when scholars saw themselves as critical of the state, such as during the 1970s at the University of Dar es Salaam, intellectual work ended up being too closely wedded to a political programme. Thus, although that university nurtured a generation of pubic intellectuals, they failed to reproduce themselves. This same fate awaits future African academics if research is not put back into teaching, and if African PhD programmes are not seen as crucial to the training of the next generation of scholars.

Our initiatives at MISR were born from these reflections. We began with the conviction that the key to research is the formulation of a research problem. We reached consensus that the definition of a research problem should stem from both a critical engagement with society at large and a solid grasp of the disciplinary literature (worldwide), so as to identify the key debates and locate specific queries within those debates. Faced with a context in which the dominant model promotes consultants, not independent researchers, we decided to create a PhD programme based on significant preparatory coursework, thus instilling in students the capacity to both rethink old questions and formulate new ones.

Our PhD programme has been offered since 2012, and seeks to combine a commitment to local and regional knowledge production, rooting itself in relevant linguistic and disciplinary terms, and reflecting critically on the globalisation of modern forms of knowledge and modern instruments of power. Rather than opposing the local and the global, we seek to understand the global from the vantage point of the local. This means, we aim to understand alternative forms of aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and political traditions, both contemporary and historical. Our objective is not just to learn *about* these forms, but also to learn *from* them. Over time, we seek to nurture a scholarly community that is equipped to rethink – both intellectually and institutionally – the very nature of the university and the function it should serve locally and globally.

## *The curriculum*

Coursework covered in the first two years is organised around a set of core courses taken by all students. These are then supplemented by electives grouped in four thematic clusters:

From a curricular perspective, the objective is for an individual student's course of study to be driven by investigation and not by orthodoxy. This approach gives primacy to the reading of key texts in related disciplines. In practical terms, students spend the first two years coming to grips with the literature and building a bibliography. In the third year they write a critical essay on this bibliography. In the fourth year, they embark on their own research year, and finally write this up in the fifth.

## *Interdisciplinarity*

In the nineteenth century, European universities developed three different domains of knowledge production – the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences – based on the notion of 'three cultures'. Each of these domains was then subdivided into 'disciplines'. From 1850 to the Second World War, this pattern became institutionalised in three key ways, namely:

The intellectual consensus that sustained this project began to break down after the 1960s, partly because of the growing overlap between disciplines and partly because of a shared problematique. For example, the line dividing the humanities from the social sciences became blurred with the increasing 'historicisation' and hence 'contextualisation' of knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences.

The development was best captured in the report of the Gulbenkian Commission chaired by Immanuel Wallerstein (see Wallerstein 1996). As interdisciplinarity began to make inroads into disciplinary specialisations, the division between the humanities and the social sciences paled in the face of the growing chasm between quantitative and qualitative perspectives in the study of social, political and cultural life. However, because it is so difficult to shift strongly entrenched habits in organisations, these intellectual developments were not matched by comparable organisational changes. Thus, although the number of interdisciplinary and regional institutes has multiplied, collaboration has rarely bridged the divide between the humanities and the social sciences. The challenge of postgraduate studies in the African university is how to produce truly interdisciplinary knowledge without giving up the ground gained within the different disciplines.

We have learned a number of lessons over the past few years. The most important is that we need to deepen our understanding of what it means to 'grow our own timber'. We could have started a PhD programme at MISR and borrowed the curriculum from Columbia or Harvard. We could then have become a satellite of those great institutions, but without the creativity that distinguishes them. In our very first semester, we confronted the question: what should we teach, at this time and in this place? What should be the content of our curriculum?

Our search for answers to that question has been protracted. Following a brainstorming session with colleagues from Ethiopia and South Africa, we held five workshops in 2011 under the umbrella title, 'Contemporary Debates' (see Mamdani 2013). Our idea was to invite scholars from around the world and from diverse intellectual traditions, whose works were defining the terms of the debate in the fields of gender in the public sphere, political economy, political studies, cultural and literary studies, and historical studies.

In 2012, we shifted our focus to hosting lecture series by key scholars. Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua University in Beijing gave lectures on his four-volume intellectual history of the Chinese-language, *The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought*. Professor Partha Chatterjee from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta gave a series of lectures on political theory and the Indian school of historiography known as subaltern studies. Through such encounters we began to put together a new curriculum that is global in content but crafted from local, regional and continental perspectives.

The question of perspective is important because research is not about finding answers to preset questions. It is about formulating new questions in response to both the evergreen flow of life and ongoing scholarly debates. The questions we ask depend on who we are, where we are, and the dilemmas we confront. Our first batch of students began to formulate their research questions in 2014 and answering them in the course of 2015. Our first batch of PhDs graduated in 2016.

## **The kernel of reform**

I have two very practical suggestions for Makerere University. The first is to substantially reduce undergraduate admissions. This would be to acknowledge today's reality: Makerere is no longer Uganda's only university. Unlike in the past, we now share responsibility for undergraduate education with a growing number of other tertiary institutions. At the same time, as the country's leading public university, our first responsibility is to provide *quality* undergraduate education. Where courses are over-subscribed, we must combine lectures with tutorials. Where classes are so overcrowded that lecturers feel compelled to distribute study notes, we risk fostering nothing more than students' dependence on similarly superficial solutions, whether from study notes or the internet. Is it not then but a short step to plagiarism? Instead, a solid reading culture must be inculcated in students at undergraduate level.

In addition, postgraduate education must become integral to the university, not a stand-alone facility that requires endless injections of external funding and input. In practice, all PhD students should be required to teach tutorials as part of their overall training. Post-doctoral fellows, too, should be required to combine teaching with research and writing. Every great university taps its doctoral students for a supply of tutors. MISR expects its PhD students to spend half of their third year tutoring undergraduates in different departments.

The development of quality students requires quality teachers. Good teachers never work only for the money, but they must be paid enough to be willing to work with diligence. Teachers are not business people; those with an eye on making money will look for work in Kikuubo (Kampala's business hub), not in a university. The important thing is to reform the motivational structure at Makerere so it attracts and rewards scholars, and discourages those who are there mainly for the money. For a start, this would mean paying meaningful salaries for teaching and research work, rather than allowances for attending endless meetings.

In fact, Makerere University should abolish all allowances for meeting attendance, as well as all payments for invigilating and marking. The money saved could be used to increase the salaries of those who teach and do research, as well as those whose services support these core activities. My guess is that this would do away with 90 per cent of meetings, and dramatically reduce the time spent in the 10 per cent of meetings that remain necessary. This strategy might not substantially increase salaries, but it would surely send the right signals to all concerned.

The starting point of any critique of neoliberalism in higher education is the recognition that a university is not a business but a place of scholarly pursuits. Its objective is to maximise scholarship, not profits. Of course, no one can afford to be blind to financial realities. Universities are no exception. But if promoting scholarship is our core mission, we must be prepared to subordinate all other considerations, including financial ones, to the pursuit of scholarship. To forget this is to lose our way.

## **Clarifying the public interest**

The Ugandan government shirks fiscal responsibility for the country's leading public university, yet continues to claim the right to define the university's policies and appoint its top management. How can this be? Of course, public universities should be substantially funded from the public purse, and their broad policies – including questions of fees and access – should be set by those who hold public power.

But who should be the custodians of the public interest in a public university? The tendency has been to see the state as holding executive power: Uganda's president was also chancellor of Makerere University before 2001. After the Universities and Other Tertiary Institutions Act of 2001, the country's president was named as the 'Visitor'. This keeps the university's top management, and thus the institution itself, on a short political leash. The alternative is to cast the legislature – not the executive – as the custodian of public interest when it comes to public universities.

It is commonly thought that if a government is going to pay a significant part of a university budget, it should have a significant say in the affairs of that institution. This is wrong for two reasons. First, in principle, government funds derive from taxation. Governments are therefore simply custodians of public resources; they cannot behave as if they own these. Second, in practice, a look at some of the world's great public university systems, such as the University of California in the US, or the nearby South African universities, is instructive. At least when these were great public systems, their financing was organised in ways that shielded them from the whims of the government of the day. Although the government was their major source of funds, their funding was determined by long-term formulas agreed on by all the key social actors; it did not fluctuate with the government in power or changes in state policy. In addition, the councils or trustees who shaped university policy were not instruments of any particular government. Even if the government appointed key members of these bodies, both the modes of their appointment and their tenures – and the legislation that specified these – ensured the autonomy of the university's policy-making bodies and its purse.

The public interest cannot be equated with the interests of any regime. The public interest is the interest of society, of which government is one part. This is why no university council should represent the government. Instead, such councils should represent all the different interests in society, providing a forum in which the public interest is discussed, debated and formulated.

## **Notes**

Second, Ecuru et al. noted that, 'The number of new research projects registered at UNCST almost tripled, from 109 in 1997/1998 to 335 in 2006/2007' and that 'much of the research in Uganda is undertaken through international collaborations and sponsorship' (2008: 9, 3). The questions that remain are: how many of these are research projects in Uganda by Ugandan researchers, and how many are projects on Uganda by externally based researchers? Obviously, once we have answers to these questions, we need to consider what this means for how and where our research agendas are set.

Third, the largest proportion of research projects were in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities (36 per cent), Medical and Health Sciences (31 per cent), and Natural Sciences (21 per cent). And further, 'In the field of Social Sciences and Humanities, most research projects were in the area of anthropology (40 per cent) and Governance (18 per cent)' (Freeman et al. 2010: 10, 12ff).

Ideally, SIDA's 2010 study team should have read this report and provided more detail, not only on how many PhDs were completed with SIDA support, but on their subject matter, and about what those candidates have done since they graduated.

5 Here is the full quote: 'Most [PhD students] expressed enthusiasm about PhD seminars at Makerere and in Sweden, but some expressed serious reservations about presenting their work, out of concern that colleagues could appropriate their ideas, citing little tradition of protection for intellectual property at Makerere' (Freeman et al. 2010: 22).

## **References**

# CHAPTER 6

# South–North collaboration and service enhancements at Makerere and Bergen University libraries

*Maria GN Musoke and Ane Landøy*

Collaboration between Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Bergen in Norway began in 1999. In 2009, the two universities celebrated the first ten years of their ongoing relationship, which includes research collaboration, scientific competence-building, student and staff exchanges, and institutional development (Musoke and Landoy 2014). The relationship also extends to the libraries at the two universities, and the collaboration between Makerere University Library (Maklib) and the University of Bergen Library (UOBL) is the focus of this chapter, although their partnership has gradually expanded to draw in libraries at other universities in Uganda, Norway and South Sudan.

Makerere University was established in Uganda in 1922, making it one of the oldest public universities in sub-Saharan Africa. Initially, it was a College of London University, then it became the University of East Africa, and later Uganda's national university. In 1958, an Act of Uganda's legislature made Maklib the first legal deposit library in the country, and it carried out this function until 2002, when Uganda's national library was established. In 1972, in addition to its primary role of serving the primary academic institution in the region, Maklib became Uganda's national reference library. The institution has a main library and ten branch or college libraries.

By mid 2014, Makerere University's full-time student population had grown to about 50 000 undergraduates and postgraduates, about half of whom are female. The demand for library services is high, and Maklib has had to respond to the changing needs of its users (Musoke 2008; 2010). The University of Bergen has just over 14 500 students and 3 200 employees. With six faculties, covering most of the traditional university subjects, the institution is heavily involved in international co-operation in research and education. UOBL has approximately 93 staff members, and six libraries – one for each faculty. The staff include librarians with traditional librarianship training, academics with masters or doctoral degrees, and others with various high-school or lower-level university backgrounds. UOBL houses several special collections (including of pictures, old and rare books, and manuscripts), and also offers digital systems and services that include open-access institutional repositories.

Like Maklib, UOBL mainly serves the university's own academic staff and students, and its staff are active in initiating library-user and other forms of training for students. This has included collaborating with other national universities in Norway to create online courses such as 'Search and Write' (www.sokogskriv.no) and 'PhD on Track' (www.phdontrack.net).

Although there are similarities in the general challenges facing the two academic libraries, their different climates and economic situations have created some key differences. Uganda is a low-income country and the university is not well funded. This creates challenges for Maklib relating to the affordability of printed resources, IT facilities, furniture and the general ambiance of the library. The costs of bandwidth and internet connectivity in Uganda have also prevented the establishment of a fully automated and integrated library service. However, when it comes to influencing the universities' administrative structures, Ugandan legislation gives Maklib full membership of the university senate. UOBL, on the other hand, is governed by a board that has no direct access to the university senate committee.

## **Academic libraries and changes in higher education**

Given the ever-changing landscape of higher education, it is helpful to consider the ongoing role and relevance of academic libraries. The rapid changes in technology, paradigm shifts in research, as well as developments in areas such as scholarly communication, data management and pedagogy within the higher education arena, have led academic libraries to develop new resources and services that address the evolving needs and expectations of library users. To remain relevant, academic libraries have had to respond and adapt. However the libraries also have to balance the need to offer new facilities with continuing to provide their core services, while anticipating future user needs related to new technologies, growing data sets and further paradigm shifts in learning, teaching and research.

Michalak (2012) pointed out that some of the factors driving these changes are networked technologies with powerful search engines that are available to all, as well as social technologies and the digitisation of almost every piece of information. Factors supporting these shifts include collaborative relationships between academic and research libraries at national, regional or international levels, state funding, and pragmatic librarians who are transforming their workplaces from lumbering and old-fashioned facilities into agile, change-oriented units ready to respond to whatever the future holds. Budgetary constraints, rapid advances in technology, and demands that libraries continue to demonstrate their value have also played a role.

Raju (2014) highlighted the forces for change in academic institutions, and their impact on the relationship between universities and academic libraries. Specifically, new methods of scholarly communication, the expansion of the libraries' virtual space via knowledge portals or research commons, the proliferation of social media, and the explosive growth of mobile devices, such as tablets and related applications, have collectively altered traditional academic libraries beyond recognition. These changes have obviously also had a significant impact on the knowledge and skills requirements of library and information-science professionals.

Technology-influenced changes in teaching and learning, linked to new knowledge products such as subject portals and subject-specific websites, as well as new physical or virtual spaces, have greatly affected university libraries. At the same time, e-science has developed rapidly in the physical and medical sciences, which have traditionally been influenced by advancing technologies, but also within the humanities and social sciences. These developments have forced a dramatic shift in the way academic and research libraries serve the needs of researchers, and many have asked how academic libraries are coping with these advances (see for example Musoke et al. 2014).

Not only are libraries' traditional services (such as building collections and supporting teaching, learning, research and dissemination) becoming increasingly digitised, but technological changes have also created new tasks and roles for academic librarians. For example, large amounts of research data, sometimes referred to as 'big data', have to be collected and curated to ensure ease of access and use. Increasingly, academic libraries are expected to provide this service, and to be able to plan for and provide for future access, which is inevitably becoming more and more open.