Staff Retention and Capacity Development in Higher Education: An Urgent Challenge for Rwanda

In aftermath of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has engaged in intensive policy-making in the higher education sector in order to build the human capital necessary for national reconstruction and development and enabling the country to respond positively to the opportunities and challenges of globalization. Prior to 1994, the country was characterized by postcolonial policies that limited access to higher education by encouraging low levels of enrollment and high dropout rates. Selection of students for university was based not on merit but on ethnic background, relationship with the church, or region of origin. The curriculum lacked diversity as most courses were in the humanities. The few courses that existed in the sciences and technical disciplines emphasized theory over the acquisition of relevant practical skills. Rwanda has witnessed dramatic changes in her education system over the last decade. The government has prioritized the need for increased investments in educational institutions in order to strengthen their delivery capacities and to improve the quality of educational outcomes. These goals have rightly been deemed as imperative to erasing the accumulated deficit in human capital of the pre-1994 era and to confronting the present challenges of building a robust economy and society. The importance accorded to investments in education is evident in Rwanda Vision 2020 and related EDPRS, which set the framework of a laudably ambitious development agenda. Investments in Higher Education over the last decade have concentrated on the rehabilitation of existing institutions and the founding of new specialized institutions in Teacher education, Health, Management, and Science and Technology. The increased investments are intended to, among other things, expand access to higher education through support to both private and public institutions, encourage innovative approaches to teaching, and raise the quality and quantity of research. All of these factors are critical to creating and sustaining a dynamic higher education infrastructure which is indispensible for the progress of any nation. Building a dynamic higher education system that is geared to supporting the development agenda of society is must confront all sorts of challenges. These range from deciding the respective roles for public and private institutions, the appropriate mechanisms and levels of funding different categories of institutions, the nature and levels of support for students, the governance structures of institutions and their relationship to government or oversight organs, how to align academic programs and curricula to national development priorities and so on. These challenges are magnified in the case of a nation like ours which suffers from enormous resource constraints, including human capital constraints. It is a given that a fundamental requirement for a dynamic higher education system is the ability to attract and retain qualified and motivated faculty. Indeed, it does not require one to be a genius to recognize that absent a cadre of qualified faculty dedicated to teaching and research, the returns on investments in higher education are bound to be sub-optimal. The reason is simple: poorly qualified and unmotivated academics can be counted on to produce poorly prepared graduates and to contribute minimally, if at all, to the growth of society’s knowledge base through rigorous research into pressing problems. Policies which undermine the ability of higher education institutions to recruit and retain qualified and motivated faculty are thus bound to jeopardize our best efforts to build a dynamic institutional infrastructure which is responsive to the pressing human capital needs of our society, now and in the future. There are many reasons behind the government’s policy on the harmonization salaries in public institutions that was initiated in 2006. No doubt, overall, the policy will contribute to the evolution of a more efficient and professional public service. However, whether intended or not, the policy has compounded the difficulties faced by higher education institutions in attracting and retaining competent and suitably motivated faculty. To state the matter boldly, the policy is tantamount to a devaluation of the academic profession in relation to other professions. The effect has been to reinforce the erosion of the ability to attract and retain academic staff in our institutions of higher learning. It is well known that the policy is more encouragement for highly qualified and experienced academicians to migrate to the government and other sectors which offer better pay and conditions of service. Younger faculty who have been sent for further training abroad, through different capacity building programs, are preferring not to return to their home institutions. They would rather look for better paying jobs elsewhere, even if this involves payment of penalties for reneging on their agreement to return to their sponsoring institutions. Still many are simply choosing not to return home because of the increasing unattractiveness of academic employment. For those who remain at our institutions, having a decent wage means looking for other income earning opportunities, for example, additional teaching at multiple institutions, consultancies, and a host of commercial activities. The result is that we are left with institutions of higher learning whose faculty is poorly remunerated, de-motivated, overstretched and cannot offer quality instruction to students nor be committed to rigorous research. Worst of all, seeking a PhD is proving unattractive to potential young scholars as they consider, rightly, that the remuneration for academics is hardly commensurate with the investment of time and effort required to earn a doctorate. The need for redress of the dire situation we face with respect to the recruitment and retention of qualified and motivated teachers and researchers in our higher education institutions is urgent. The experience of other African countries ought to make this crystal clear. The economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s led to steep declines in investments in higher education and faculty salaries across the continent. The result was the degradation of universities as they lost their most experienced and qualified teachers, many of who chose to emigrate to western countries and other regions. In fact, attendance of the annual conference of the African Studies Association of the United States will readily confirm that the critical mass of African academics today is to be found in the United States and not on our continent! It is a sad paradox that our continent which lags behind other developing regions in higher education is a major exporter of intellectual capital. Happily, and thanks more to the efforts of western philanthropic foundations and other development partners than to African governments, the rebuilding of African higher education institutions is now prominent on the development agenda. The lessons of the African experience, for us, is how to prevent a problem – declining ability to recruit and retain qualified and motivated professionals in our higher education institutions – from getting worst. They are no easy solutions to the problem but the cost of our failure to confront the problem NOW will be long lasting and difficult to undo. Our policy makers and we, the citizens of Rwanda, need to engage in a rigorous search for a solution to this problem; else we defeat the purpose of the laudable investments of higher education of the last decade. In our search for solutions, we need to begin by asking ourselves a few elementary questions. First, what is the value we chose to place on higher education as an important requirement for sustained development? Second, if we consider higher education central to our goal of building a prosperous and stable society, what is fair compensation for those to whom we assign the responsibility for ensuring that we have the best higher education system possible? Thirdly, what is the best way of ensuring fair determination of the remuneration of faculty, for example, should our institutions have independent authority to determine the rates and forms of compensation of their academics or should these be based on uniform national scales established by the government? A premise of this intervention, and for the needed conversation on how we respond to the capacity problems of our higher education system, is that a society which is intellectually dependent is a society lacking an essential ingredient in its capacity to decide what its critical needs are and how best to address them. How we respond to the challenges of recruiting, nurturing and retaining top-rate staff at our institutions of higher learning and research will thus speak volumes about our determination or lack thereof to move towards intellectual independence. The writer is Senior Research Fellow and Acting Executive Director, Institute of Policy Analysis and Research- Rwanda (IPAR-Rwanda) Contact: antoniamutoro@yahoo.com