Blog

Building African higher education will take time – but the investment will be worthwhile. One delegate at last week’s African Higher Education Summit warned that, unless higher education was given equal priority to that of the primary and secondary sectors, African education would be like a ‘pyramid without a roof’. What a wonderful analogy! Not only because it sums up the position perfectly, or because for ...

Last week, the first in a series of policy symposia were held in Ghana and Uganda, as part of a new raft of activities being undertaken by the Development Research Uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa (DRUSSA). The ACU is the lead partner in this DfID funded programme, which is seeking to assist in supporting research intensive African universities to play a greater role in contributing to the evidence base to address specific development ...

On 16-18 September, the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Zimbabwe hosted a conference themed around gender mainstreaming at higher education institutions beyond 2015. The participants agreed that, while countries have ratified regional and international agreements on gender equality, a lot remains to be done to achieve it at institutional level and in practice. The predominant issue raised at the event was ...

Following this month's HR Management and PR Network Conference in Glasgow, many delegates expressed their delight at the caliber of the speakers, and were particularly impressed by the high ratio of women in senior roles within ACU member institutions who presented at the conference. We asked a few of these women to comment on what it’s like to be a woman in senior higher education management. Andrea Farquhar from McMaster ...

Both time and resources need to be invested from all levels of the university if research uptake is to become a core activity of the university. This was the message that emanated from an interactive workshop involving the ACU during yesterday’s International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) 2014 Congress held in Washington DC. The ACU brought together facilitators and presenters from DRUSSA member ...

Many of the solutions to the global challenges we may face in the near future are expected to be solved through research. Therefore, as Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) continue to be major producers and drivers of research, what they research and how they manage that research is particularly relevant to how these global challenges will be addressed. Research Management (RM) as a discipline can be defined as ‘any action ...

It is not often that the review of a project states that said project has achieved considerably more than was expected at its inception. However, this was precisely the tenor of the European Commission’s second year review of Research Data Alliance Europe (RDA Europe) – a project in which the ACU has played a lead role in its activities, and which has made a significant global impact, especially around the grand ...

Maybe I’m getting old and careless – but sometimes I think that we in higher education worry just a bit too much. This thought struck me again this week, when I read a thoughtful article by Jane Knight in University World News, titled The limits of soft power in higher education. Although soft diplomacy is a relatively new term, the author fears that ‘international higher education has been drawn to [it] like bees ...

Publishers for Development (PfD)– a joint advocacy initiative of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) – was launched in 2008 as a forum for information and discussion around the importance of access to information for development. It explores some of the unique challenges developing country libraries, researchers and ...

For just over a year now, member universities of the DRUSSA programme have been a busy group – developing new systems for increasing research uptake, sharing ideas, leading conversations on the online DRUSSA 'Coffee Station', and participating in research uptake workshops on their own campuses. Last week, these member universities had the opportunity to come together in Nairobi, taking part in one of the highlights of the ...