Financing Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Sustainable Development Goal Target 4.3 aims to achieve equal access to affordable technical, vocational and higher education. While the demand for higher education is high in most countries with large youth populations, achieving this goal by 2030 will be impossible without attention to reducing the historical and systemic gap in access by wealth and gender.
In this panel we explore the trends in access and financing of higher education for two regions in the world, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the lowest regional enrolment rate in the world, at only 9% (UIS, 2020; UNESCO-IESALC, 2020). South Asian region fairs better in enrolment at 26% but this hides the wide disparities between countries with Afghanistan at 11%, Pakistan at 12% and India at 29% (UIS, 2020).
Improved access to tertiary education benefits the individual (improved productivity, income, health, etc.) and society as a whole with increased tax revenue, economic growth, knowledge creation, research and development, improved public health, lower rates of crime and better social cohesion. Recently research has reinforced that attainment of tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Africa strongly impacts social mobility (Shafiq, Toutkoushian & Valerio, 2019), especially since the returns to tertiary education are the largest for the poorest 40 per cent of the population (Darvas, Gao, Shen & Bawany, 2017; Montenegro & Patrinos, 2014).
Despite higher education's individual and social benefits, the sector remains highly inequitable in access and perpetuates an “elite system”. Trends in access to higher education have reproduced social inequity rather than reducing it (Ilie &Rose, 2018).
A study from 28 Sub-Saharan countries shows that in three-fourths of the countries, individuals from the top two wealth quintile occupy nearly 80% of spaces in tertiary education, and individuals from the poorest households are five times less likely to enrol than individuals from the wealthiest households (Darvas, Ballal & Feda, 2014). Individuals’ socioeconomic background, household wealth and parental education remain the best indicators of access to tertiary education (Darvas et al., 2017). Another study showed that when the population is divided in two groups of poorest and richest, out of 35 countries only in four (Comoros, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan) more than 5% of the poorest youth have access to higher education; furthermore rich youth are 3-5 times more likely to access higher education than poor youth (Ilie & Rose, 2016). Both direct and indirect costs remain a significant barrier for students from poorer households accessing higher education.



Tertiary education spending within the government expenditure on education represented 21% (2014) in Sub-Saharan Africa and 22% in South Asia. These allocations are often insufficient to meet the growing demand, and few countries have the ability to increase their public financing of tertiary education as their tax base is generally weak, and it is difficult to raise the share of the budget dedicated to tertiary education when there is also a significant demand for access to primary and secondary education (World Bank, 2010).
Tuition fees have increasingly become an accepted necessity for providing higher education and addressing the lack of public funding. In addition to government and public financing, sources of higher education finance include i) parents/ caregivers and households; ii) the students themselves; iii) loans from government or commercial banks iv) individual and institutional donors; and iv) income-generating activities of the academic institutions (Amin & Ntembe, 2020). However, available student financing has its shortcomings. For example, existing scholarships and bursaries are predominantly oriented towards the top one per cent of performers or the most in need (SPHEIR, n.d.) and disproportionately give an advantage to students from higher-income households. Additionally, governments often lack the resources to lend to students or the financial structures and data to manage large-scale student loan programs. Commercial bank loans are often out of reach of low and middle-income students, especially those with limited means to prove collateral, credit history or family incomes. This makes student financing unobtainable for many. Therefore, innovation in student financing programs is necessary to bridge the financial gap and increase accessibility to available financing to a broad segment of students.
This panel presents research and financing initiatives that address the equity challenge in higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Learnings from the research presented here help understand how and under what conditions could innovative financing mechanisms tackle the challenge of addressing the financial barrier to access higher education for disadvantaged populations. This research aims to inform the debates on strategies for financing equitable higher education like student loans, scholarships, subsidies, graduate taxes, etc.

Sub Unit

• Higher Education SIG

Organizer

• Arushi Terway, NORRAG

Chair

• Marina Dreux Frotté, NORRAG

Individual Presentations

• Challenges with higher education financing - Allan Kimaina, University of Cape Town; Kamlesh Goyal, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

• Lending for Education in Africa Partnership: An innovative student loan programme - Justine Burns, University of Cape Town

• Models of Higher Education Financing - Yageshree Moodley

Discussant

• Tristan McCowan, University College London