About 77 percent of Africans study in Europe

About 77 percent of all African students who study abroad do so in Europe while 18 per cent of all foreign students in Europe are from Africa, a 2004 global statistics on enrolment in higher education has revealed.

It also said out of about 144 million students who enrolled in institutions of higher education in the said year, about 3 million of them migrated from the Africa sub-region to Europe.

Prof Goolam Mohamedbhai, Secretary-General of the Association of African Universities (AAU), made this known at a two-day workshop organised by AAU with joint support from the European University Association (EUA), Norwegian Rectors' Conference, the InterUniverversity Council for Development Cooperation of Flanders and European Access Network in Accra.

The workshop dubbed, “Access to Success: Fostering Trust and Exchange between Europe and Africa”, sought to raise awareness of access and retention issues in higher education in Africa and Europe.

The event which brought together about 80 representatives of senior leadership and management personalities from Africa and Europe, would also explore how higher education institutions in both regions cope with the changing demands of their specific socio-economic environments.

The meeting, among other things, would deliberate on how to develop effective measures towards inter-institutional cooperation between Europe and Africa on student and staff mobility schemes and capacity building.

Prof Mohamedbhai said three European countries that received the largest number of the foreign students were the United Kingdom, Germany and France accounting for about 30 per cent.

“From the perspective of outgoing students, it is alarming to note that sub-Saharan Africa is the region that has the highest outbound mobility share of its total education population, about three times the average”, he said.

Mr Alex Tetteh-Enyo, Minister of Education, in an address, challenged Africa states not to bemoan much on the negative side of “brain drain” but to develop creative ways of making the best use of it to help the development of the continent.

“Africa must think of creative ways of maximizing the global trend to its advantage and make it a “brain gain”, he said.

Commenting on the theme for the workshop, Mr Tetteh-Enyo said due to mismanagement, the lack of resource and astronomical increase in population, Africa's public universities established by the colonial master after independence had deteriorated in its educational programmes.

“As a result of this, Africa has found it almost impossible to retain a reasonable level of faculty in these higher educations leading to the 'brain drain”, he said.

Prof. Clifford N.B Tagoe, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, in an address noted that higher education in Africa continued to face challenges including inadequate funding, and high student-to-teacher ratio that had affected the quality of teaching, leaning and research.

He urged African leaders to make funds available to the various higher institutions to train graduates to be able to compete on the global market.