Frontline states look for brains trust

South Africa's neighbours are hoping the country's transformation will revitalise higher education throughout the region, but also fear the build-up of a new, regional brain drain to its better resourced universities.

Tanzania and Zambia have already begun to lose some professors to South Africa. Yet all the countries of the region face increasing demand for higher education and many, like South Africa, are also in a period of transition.

Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi and soon Angola are in the throes of their own change-overs, from colonisation, civil war or single-party rule, to multi-party democracy.

While most countries are thinking in terms of linkage, Malawi, just emerging from 30 years of neglect of higher education under former life-president Hastings Banda, has dreams of a brand new university.

Although the pro-Western Banda regime was a favourite with international donors, university provision scarcely expanded while the population doubled. Now the country has an annual intake of only 800 students for a population of well over eight million.

Its medical faculty has just 16 students and eight academics - a huge waste of resources.

"We're planning a new university for the north of the country to meet the demand coming from the many school leavers who would benefit from higher education - and benefit Malawi," education minister Sam Mpasu said.

But the donor community is responding to the idea of a second university with mixed reactions. Last month Mr Mpasu attended a conference on pan-African social development in Paris. "Unesco's initiative has come at a very interesting time, because - with respect to Malawi - virtually the entire donor community is anti-higher education," he commented.

The conference's conclusions on higher education - renewed commitment of public funds, paired with new efforts to find alternative funding - were then discussed at a meeting of Unesco's new advisory committee on higher education.

It is planning a series of regional conferences in 1996 to prepare for a world conference of higher education. The Eduardo Mondlane University has a Unesco chair in environmental studies and is now linked with the University of Western Cape and the universities of Zimbabwe and Namibia for research and teaching in the discipline.

Such networks can only slowly replace the loss of training provision in communist Eastern Europe for Mozambique, but they have the advantage of being fully integrated and adapted to local realities.

"It's an exciting time for all of us. There are new prospects for regional cooperation, for regional utilisation of resources, but also new challenges," Narciso Matos, vice chancellor of Mozambique's Eduardo Mondlane University, said.

"There is a new, big market in the region and we have to expect some experts from our university will be attracted by better opportunities in South Africa. The only way to prevent a new brain drain is to have comprehensive schemes of cooperation - exchange of personnel, not a one-way movement.

"In recent months, we've seen South African vice chancellors who are interested in schemes in the region. But although some coordination is emerging, it is mostly ad hoc, mostly bi-lateral," Dr Matos said.

There are several examples of long-standing resource-sharing in Southern Africa. Swaziland, for example, has long shared agricultural training with Botswana.

Lydia Makhuba, vice chancellor of the University of Swaziland, said:"There is so much we could share, but sharing always seems to be frustrated by national interests.

"One may get the feeling that because of our resource differentials, the South African universities are going to be too powerful for us," she said.

"But on the other hand we too have a lot to offer - we may be small, but we have experience."

South Africa is now tackling tasks its little neighbour dealt with two decades ago, such as mounting pre-university programmes for under-prepared school-leavers, upgrading teachers and generally organising higher education for development. In the meanwhile, the academic community in the region awaits the successful completion of South Africa's political transition for cooperation to take off on a greater scale.

"We know they have to deliver to their own people first and we understand that entirely," said Mr Mpasu.