Australia cannot keep ignoring the sweeping demographic and economic changes set to put Africa centre stage by the end of the century, and universities must take matters into their own hands by making higher education a “central pillar” of Australia-Africa relations.

A new argues that the time has come for Australia to “take a global view on the higher education proposition” and produce “Africa offers” that “look beyond the balance sheet at much more substantial value creation”.

“Governments regulate and fund higher education, but ultimately it is universities which must…carve out opportunities,” says the ����Vlog Futures Lab briefing. “Australia won’t know until the 2050s if African higher education is doing what Asia did in the mid-1990s, but it sure feels that way.”

The paper argues that Australia’s success in attracting “tuition cash” from Asia has encouraged an African blind spot that reflects neglect across government, industry and society. Canberra has just nine embassies and high commissions in a continent of 54 countries, of which many locals would struggle to “place more than a handful”.

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Media coverage of Africa is relentlessly negative and the school curriculum tends to focus on colonial history. There are roughly 10 weekly flights between Australia and Africa, compared with 60 to the US and 100 to China.

Today’s executives describe Africa in the same terms their 1990s predecessors used about Asia, focusing on integrity issues, difficulty securing visas, “infrastructure grumbles” and lack of money. Such appraisals overlook the opportunities in the world’s fastest-growing continent, where the population will overtake Asia’s around the turn of the century, about six in 10 people are aged under 25 and many countries are “zooming” from agricultural into service economies.

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“Higher education is booming in Africa,” the paper says. “Millions of young people are flowing into rapidly proliferating programmes. Investors are crowding in from around the world. Fresh PhDs are nurturing new kinds of curriculum. Governments are innovating regulatory and funding approaches. Graduates are advancing economies through step change transformations.”

Yet the boom is constrained by resources, with education funding and research expenditure both below 1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in most countries – well below Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development norms. Many countries have about one-eighth as many researchers per capita as Australia, and enough tertiary education teachers to staff a handful of Australian universities.

“Pressure, opportunity, brilliance and contradiction abound, as do unavoidable problems,” the paper says. “An avoidable problem is that one of the world’s great higher education systems – Australia – is almost nowhere to be found.”

Although Africa represents just 1 per cent of Australia’s GDP, “it is very much part of our future”, said co-author Hamish Coates. “To realise that we need to go beyond seeing it as a scary destination for aid dollars to…somewhere we can co-create future forms of higher education, and all of the wonderful professional work that that will yield.”

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Coates said talk about Africa was a “normalised discussion” in Chinese higher education circles. “In Australia, you get a lot of blank stares. I could probably count on one hand…the number of current senior [university] executives who have landed there and done a deal.”

Current indicators are “littered with evidence of disengagement”, the paper says. There is no major dedicated government-funded research collaboration programme, and Australia allocates a “paltry” 45 scholarships to talented Africans compared with tens of thousands to Chinese. More than twice as many students come from Nepal as the entire African continent, and the New Colombo Plan – Australia’s flagship outward mobility scheme for students – excludes African countries as destinations.

The paper highlights university-to-university partnerships and investment in infrastructure and research education among the opportunities for Australian universities. It stresses the “favourable geography, language ties and connectivity” in East and Southern Africa – particularly Botswana, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda and South Africa.

Kenya sends more students to Australia than any other African country, and Mauritius – “one of the wealthiest African countries per capita” – is an established higher education hub. Botswana is following suit, trading on its reputation for safety and good governance as it tries to reduce its reliance on diamond exports.

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Rwanda is doing likewise, with Kigali Innovation City exemplifying its focus on “investment, innovation and institution” as it rebuilds from the 1990s genocide, Coates said. “There is certainly a feel when you’re in Kigali…that people are going there to trade ideas and do deals,” he said. “The Swedish, the Canadians, the Americans, the Chinese – and the Australians aren’t there.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com