Expanding Tertiary Education For Well Paid Jobs

Expanding Tertiary education with quality, relevance and equity is one of the most decisive challenges for Kenya’s future, including the achievement of the ideals of the 2010 Constitution and, especially, its 2030 vision, which aims at transforming Kenya into a “newly industrializing, middle income, globally competitive and prosperous country†?. That is because tertiary education can contribute in a critical manner to successfully overcome several of the country’s challenges. This book provide analysis and policy recommendations to Government of Kenya, tertiary education leaders and the many stakeholders on managing the massive tertiary education expansion facing the country. This book, first, discusses the motivation for the analysis and its choice of three critical topics: quality and relevance; governance, and student financing. Secondly, it reviews findings on each area, and, third, it ends with a set of policy recommendations.

Ghana was, until very recently, a success story in Africa, achieving high and sustained growth and impressive poverty reduction. However, Ghana is now facing major challenges in diversifying its economy, sustaining growth, and making it more inclusive. Most of the new jobs that have been created in the past decade have been in low-earning, low-productivity trade services. Macroeconomic instability, limited diversification and growing inequities in Ghana’s labor markets make it harder for the economy to create more jobs, and particularly, better jobs. Employment needs to expand in both urban areas, which will continue to grow rapidly, and rural areas, where poverty is still concentrated. The current fiscal and economic crisis is heightening the need for urgent reforms but limiting the room for maneuver and increasing pressure for a careful prioritization of policy actions. Going forward, Ghana will need to consider an integrated jobs strategy that addresses barriers to the business climate, deficiencies in skills, lack of competitiveness of job-creating sectors, problems with labor mobility, and the need for comprehensive labor market regulation. Ghana needs to diversify its economy through gains in productivity in sectors like agribusiness, transport, construction, energy, and information and communications technology (ICT) services. Productivity needs to be increased also in agriculture, in order to increase the earnings potential for the many poor who still work there. In particular, Ghana’s youth and women need help in connecting to these jobs, through relevant skills development and services that target gaps in information about job opportunities. Even with significant effort, most of Ghana’s population will continue to work in jobs characterized by low and fluctuating earnings for the foreseeable future, however, and they will need social safety nets that help them manage vulnerability to income shortfalls. More productive and inclusive jobs will help Ghana move to a second phase of structural transformation and develop into a modern middle-income economy.

What have postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries achieved in their education policies and programmes? How far have they contributed to successful attainment of the targeted 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education? What were the constraints and barriers for developing an education system that appeals to the needs of the sub-region? Re-thinking Postcolonial Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century: Post-Millennium Development Goals is an attempt to demonstrate that Sub-Saharan Africa has the potential and capability to provide solutions to challenges facing its desire and ability to provide sustainable education to its people. To that end, the contributors are academics with an African vision attempting to come up with African home-grown perspectives to fill the gap created by the lapse of the MDGs as the guiding vision and framework for educational provision in Africa and beyond. The book seeks to articulate and address African issues from an informed as well as objective African perspective. The book is also intended to provide insights to scholars who are interested in studying and understanding the nature of postcolonial education in the Sub-Saharan African region. Given the objectives and themes of this book, it is intended for academic scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, human rights scholars, curriculum developers, college and university academics, teachers, education policy makers, international organisations, and local and international non-governmental organisations that are interested in African education policies and programmes. “Rethinking Postcolonial Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century provides contemporary reflections from multiple perspectives and re-positions the issue of education at the forefront of the debates on African development.” – Lamine Diallo, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada “The book is a welcome addition to discourses and analyses on education in sub-Saharan Africa with reference to a postcolonial critique and the Millennium Development Goals framework on education in Africa.” – Michael Tonderai Kariwo, PhD, Instructor and Research Fellow, University of Alberta, Canada

This book presents a comprehensive institutional level analysis of a single public institution of higher education in the Republic of Kenya using the case study method of investigation. It is the first case study to use both qualitative and quantitative research methodology to illuminate the experiences of Kenyan public universities with internationalization post-independence. Focusing on Kenya’s oldest national public university—the University of Nairobi’s experimentation with internationalization, Kenyan Public Universities in the Age of Internationalization is a first in the East African region. The book argues that attempts by institutions of higher education in Africa to engage in internationalization with the much more older and well established IHEs in the developed world has perpetuated the colonial legacy that has relegated these institutions to the position of the Other in the new international order. Several policy implications are offered on what it means to participate in internationalization from a marginal, peripheral position. The conventional assumption that political independence would bring to most African countries, and by extension their national public universities, a period of freedom from political, economic and cultural subjugation and exploitation by the more powerful world nations has proved elusive. This book is intended for a broad audience in the field of Comparative International Education. The mixed research methods used in this book will certainly appeal to instructors, students, and general readers interested in understanding the experiences of historically marginalized developing World institutions of higher education with internationalization.

Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. New ways of production are adopted, markets expand, and societies evolve. But some changes provoke more attention than others, in part due to the vast uncertainty involved in making predictions about the future. The 2019 World Development Report will study how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today. Technological progress disrupts existing systems. A new social contract is needed to smooth the transition and guard against rising inequality. Significant investments in human capital throughout a person’s lifecycle are vital to this effort. If workers are to stay competitive against machines they need to train or retool existing skills. A social protection system that includes a minimum basic level of protection for workers and citizens can complement new forms of employment. Improved private sector policies to encourage startup activity and competition can help countries compete in the digital age. Governments also need to ensure that firms pay their fair share of taxes, in part to fund this new social contract. The 2019 World Development Report presents an analysis of these issues based upon the available evidence.

The last half century has seen a dramatic expansion in access to primary, secondary, and higher education in many nations around the world. Educational expansion is desirable for a country's economy, beneficial for educated individuals themselves, and is also a strategy for greater social harmony. But has greater access to education reduced or exacerbated social inequality? Who are the winners and the losers in the scramble for educational advantage? In Growing Gaps, Paul Attewell and Katherine S. Newman bring together an impressive group of scholars to closely examine the relationship between inequality and education. The relationship is not straightforward and sometimes paradoxical. Across both post-industrial societies and the high-growth economies of the developing world, education has become the central path for upward mobility even as it maintains and exacerbates existing inequalities. In many countries there has been a staggering growth of private education as demand for opportunity has outpaced supply, but the families who must fund this human capital accumulation are burdened with more and more debt. Privatizing education leads to intensified inequality, as students from families with resources enjoy the benefits of these new institutions while poorer students face intense competition for entry to under-resourced public universities and schools. The ever-increasing supply of qualified, young workers face class- or race-based inequalities when they attempt to translate their credentials into suitable jobs. Covering almost every continent, Growing Gaps provides an overarching and essential examination of the worldwide race for educational advantage and will serve as a lasting achievement towards understanding the root causes of inequality.

These indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it, how education systems operate and the results achieved.

The present study exploratively investigated the role of organizational culture in performance management practices in Kenyan higher education institutions. Specifically, the influence of organizational culture on the purpose and extent to which performance information is used was explored. Qualitative interviews were conducted followed by quantitative surveys, which were filled out by teaching and non-teaching staff in various universities in Kenya. The findings provide evidence of linkages between performance information use, diversity of measure and organizational culture. It has been established that, depending on whether flexibility or control values are dominant in the culture of an institution; performance information is used in varying ways. Institutions where flexibility values were dominant in their organizational cultures used performance information for attention focus, monitoring and decision making to a higher extent than universities where control values were dominant. Institutions where Flexibility values were dominant also showed a more diverse set of performance measures than in those where control values were dominant.