Sustaining Home-Grown Innovations in Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa : A Critical Reflection

In the early post-colonial period, African leaders articulated in unison the necessity for promoting substantive change in their inherited systems through reforms. Paradoxically, during the same period they built new higher education institutions, especially universities, modeled after those in the former colonizing colonial powers. As the majority of these reforms were not satisfactorily implemented, since the beginning of this first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been greater interest in innovations as a more focused and promising strategy for change to improve the performance of the universities. This paper is basically a reflective essay that conceptualizes innovative strategy as a necessary and permanent corrective tool to redress and prevent institutional deficiencies. After presenting some of the African experiences in recent innovations, it examines the conditions for rooting and sustaining home-grown innovations. Given the powerful dependency framework and the external control over the financial resources, national policies are in effect set by external powers. The latter determine priorities in Africa including the type of innovations that may be considered worth being supported. It is argued that the most effective way to sustain innovations in African higher education for social progress is to create the conditions in the learning system to foster innovative minds.