Developing African Higher Education

Education has an extraordinary potential for generating development. Nonetheless, today’s education, particularly university education is propagating ‘maldevelopment’the disintegration of the educational continuum and the absence of a social contract on education lies at the heart of this contradiction. Higher education has the responsibility of creating the capacity for sustainable development and the democratization of knowledge, the key to genuine democracy. The distribution of knowledge is even more distorted than is the distribution of income, wealth and power. The main determinant of poverty today is neither lack of natural resources nor geographical marginality, but rather the lack of appropriate human capital to produce added value, make use of technology and attract investments (Xabier Gorostiaga, 1999).