Foreign student tax is mooted for Africa

An initiative to revitalise Africa's struggling universities and demoralised academics through a "tax" on visiting students from the world's wealthier nations was launched in Paris last week.

David Wiley, director of the Africa studies centre at Michigan State University and co-chair of the African Universities Initiative, said it was time for the West to repay some of the damage inflicted on the continent during the cold war, when corrupt and inefficient post-colonial regimes received military, economic and political support from the West.

Dr Wiley used a Unesco conference of higher education partners in Paris as a platform to launch an appeal to academics, universities, international agencies and non-governmental organisations to join the initiative to revitalise the continent's universities and ensure that governments made it a priority. "We are here to call for partnership out of a belief that we need strong African studies in Africa," he said.

He outlined a programme of ethical and transparent research partnerships between universities in the developed world and in Africa, designed to build cooperation and trust with African universities and scholars.

One of the projects is to make free-of-charge journals on Africa available throughout the continent on CD-Rom, but to sell them to western scholars, universities and libraries to ensure the revenues are deployed where they will be of maximum benefit.

Dr Wiley also suggested a "tax" on students from wealthier universities in the West who study on exchange programmes in Africa.

Many universities charged their students the full US fee, but paid out only the African universities' lower-level fees while they were on exchange programmes.

The university that was effectively outsourcing its teaching to African universities retained the balance. At Michigan State University that money is already being transferred to fund exchange programmes designed to bring African students to the US.

Chuku-Dinka Spencer, of the African Development Bank, appealed to donors and international agencies to consider the effects of HIV/Aids and the impact of years of conflict.

George Haddad, president of the Sorbonne, Paris, and a member of a Unesco/World Bank task force on the development role of universities, launched in Europe at the conference, said teachers and students should have the right to an education, even in war zones.

"What we need is to imagine an initiative that could speedily and effectively help finance African research in all disciplines," he added, suggesting a range of prizes for the best doctoral theses by African students across all disciplines.

http://isp.msu.edu/AfricanStudies/ The task force report "Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril or Promise" is available at http://www.tfhe.net