The need for capacity development in higher education in the Global South will remain, if not increase, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But can and will initiatives in this area be sustained during the current crisis and beyond?
Many universities support, in one way or another, partner institutions in poorer countries and regions, often in the Global South. Usually the aim is to strengthen the capacity of these partners to offer higher education of good quality, to underscore local development agendas and, along the way, contribute to the global sustainable development agenda. Sometimes research capacity is also developed with similar aims.
Typically, efforts are implemented as international collaborative projects between universities from the Global North and South, backed by funding from national governments or multilateral bodies such as the World Bank, European Union, United Nations agencies or private donors. There is widespread recognition of the need for and importance of such collaborative efforts around the globe.
However, the COVID-19 crisis has forced universities everywhere into crisis mode overnight and meant that they have had to focus on keeping their own education and research running in the first instance. Capacity building efforts supporting far-away partners tend not to be part of the core concern.
In addition, funding for such efforts may become less reliable as the upcoming economic crisis will affect international cooperation budgets. Will higher education capacity building efforts survive?
The move online
Feedback from colleagues engaged in capacity building efforts after the first months of the crisis suggest the following trends.
The implementation of capacity building projects in higher education is crucially dependent on intercontinental mobility which, in most initiatives, comprises most of the activity.
The first immediate response to the COVID-19 crisis and lockdowns around the globe has logically been to try to substitute all mobility with virtual activities. Site and exposure visits, training and education, workshops and consultancies have been replaced overnight by Zoom meetings, webinars, distance education and endless Skype calls.
Along the way, the learning curve in doing so has been steep and, under the pressure of current restrictions, innovative solutions have often been developed. Still, the general experience is that virtual cooperation also has many limitations.
As long as activities run smoothly, virtual cooperation will work to some extent. But when challenges and problems arise, as they always will, these will be difficult to solve at a distance. In addition, it is almost impossible to contextualise efforts sufficiently from a distance.
Moreover, precisely those groups that are often targeted in capacity building efforts, such as socio-economically vulnerable groups, women, girls, youth from poorer backgrounds, etc, tend to be less virtually connected. Hence, most colleagues believe that capacity building projects can be implemented only partly by virtual cooperation, but that it is impossible to implement and complete projects comprehensively and successfully purely by virtual means.
Delays and funding issues
So, as far as ongoing efforts are concerned, it is expected that the current crisis will lead to substantial delays in project implementation. It will be difficult or impossible to achieve all objectives and intended outcomes as long as the crisis lasts. The longer it takes for intercontinental mobility to be restored to a certain minimum level, the stronger these effects will be.
An undesirable side-effect of this slowing down of efforts may be a considerable underspending in the funding schemes that underpin these efforts. The excessive current spending of public money and the upcoming economic crisis is likely to affect budgets for international cooperation negatively in the medium and longer term. Current underspending may backfire by making future funding for higher education capacity building vulnerable to budget cuts.
Intercontinental travel may become significantly more expensive, increasing the costs of non-virtual cooperation. The ambivalent impact will be that, on the one hand, this will contribute to slowing down pollution and climate change and may reduce uneconomic and inefficient travelling; on the other hand it will complicate international movement and meetings in those cases where it will remain most needed.
The future after the pandemic will also be a testing ground. How serious are universities in the affluent parts of the world in their commitment to higher education capacity building and knowledge cooperation with partners far away in the Global South, the kind of capacity building that underpins global sustainable development?
Will universities maintain their commitment and continue their efforts? Will that also be the case when such cooperation becomes more expensive, when there might be less external funding and initiatives can no longer be classified as ‘income-generating activities’ in annual financial audits? How will they live up to the solemnly pledged values concerning global sustainable development in their mission statements and strategic plans?
Greater independence?
At the same time, for higher education in less-developed regions the current boost in virtual cooperation combined with some sort of isolation when it comes to physical mobility might turn out to be an incentive for independent development. Like mobile telephony did, the current situation may induce some leap-frogging progress to develop locally relevant higher education formats – although with a constant risk that already disadvantaged groups will have difficulty catching up.
Curricula may develop that, though open to the globalised world, may be less dependent on or derived from the higher education elite in this world, as symbolised by the university community usually topping the common global university rankings. Higher education offerings may evolve that are a genuine local product – fully internalised and primarily catering for local development needs – although still contextualised by a much larger world.
However, such developments will still need and may receive respectful international support. This will need cooperation with universities around the world, ideally not purely in virtual ways and for selfish interests and funding from governments and multilateral agencies. Such cooperation will be in our mutual interest – something that is also one of the lessons of the current crisis. ♦
