BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Thirteen years of higher education development in Afghanistan – the challenge of sustainability

Tue, April 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific F

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel will analyze the successes and challenges of achieving sustainable changes based on 13 years of experience of three consecutive, USAID-funded projects focused on developing the Higher Education system in Afghanistan. Members of the panel have all been directly engaged in the implementation of these projects as part of the team at the Center for International Education at UMass Amherst.

The panel will have four presentations, beginning with an overview of the context of higher education in Afghanistan, and followed by presentations on three key aspects of the challenge of creating a modern higher education system in that context: Graduate Education, University Autonomy, and Quality Assurance and Accreditation. These are critical components of a modern system, each of which faces its own challenges of sustainability as the external assistance which developed these components is phased out after 13 years of effort.

The panel will begin with brief summary that will highlight the evolution of the higher education system in the past 15 years, particularly its explosive growth. Some of the key constraining factors will be highlighted like the constitutional guarantee of free higher education through the Bachelor’s degree level (Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, 2004, The Constitution of Afghanistan), and the very heavy dependence of the Afghan government on external donors to fund its operating costs. The enrollment growth will be viewed in the context of the much slower growth of funding for higher education. (Hayward, 2015, Transforming Higher Education in Afghanistan).

Individual presentations will focus on three components, all of which represent functions that did not previously exist in the higher education system of Afghanistan:

• Creation of Master’s degrees and Graduate Education governance
• Development of university autonomy in a highly centralized national system of higher education.
• Development of Quality Assurance and Accreditation mechanisms

Each of these components reflects the development of structures and capacity that are essential for a modern system of higher education. (Ministry of Higher Education, 2015, National Higher Education Strategic Plan: 2015-19) The presentations will focus on the difficult transition from creating structures and capacities using external funding to leaving viable, self-supporting structures when external support ceases.

The analysis of sustainability issues for each component will use the conceptual framework for social analysis articulated in Tools for Institutional, Political, and Social Analysis of Policy Reform: A Sourcebook for Development Practitioners (Holland, 2007, World Bank). The analysis of sustainability will focus on three levels:

• Macro-level – in this case the national context of higher education as embodied in the policies, organization, and capacity of the Ministry of Higher Education
• Meso-level – focused on the public universities and their relationship to the MoHE, their structures, and their institutional capacity
• Micro-level – the challenges at the individual level of academic leaders, administrators and faculty members who will either facilitate or inhibit the sustainability of changes

For each component and level of analysis the presenters will reflect on the project experience, review relevant documents, interview key actors, and draw upon research carried out by Afghans for Master’s and Doctoral degrees. They will also draw upon literature and knowledge of the local context to examine the various meanings of sustainability.

Although sustainability is an explicit goal of most development projects, the meaning of sustainability is inherently a contested and multi-faceted concept (Mog, 2004, World Development). Discussions about sustainability normally assume that the term has a clear, shared meaning, when in reality that is not case. Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith argue that institutional sustainability depends on maintaining: responsive output flows, cost-effective goods and services, and adequate revenue flows. (1992, p. 369, World Development).

A new organization or unit must have permanent staffing and a budget; a new degree needs qualified faculty available to teach and an institutional management structure to support the degree; a new national policy for accreditation requires a structure and procedures necessary to implement and monitor the policy.

In the context of USWDP sustainability can be more narrowly interpreted to mean that organizational structures, new degree programs, and policies created by the project, are able to continue effectively after external funding ceases. For each activity within USWDP, sustainability takes on a somewhat different meaning which changes for each of the three analytic levels.

Each component will describe the changes that have taken place during the past decade and the evolving challenges that have resulted. The characteristics of the context define the boundaries of the forms that sustainability can take and the feasible strategies that can be used to achieve it. Sustainability successes and ongoing challenges will be identified for each of the components.

In crisis and conflict setting like Afghanistan, the challenges for both development and sustainability are daunting. During the development stages the external organizations must find ways to operate while burdened with very high security costs and constraints. They must operate in ways that provide as much protection as possible for their Afghan counterparts. They are constrained by sometimes significant restrictions imposed by the funding agency as well.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant