23 Feb 2020

Assistant Minister of Tertiary Education, Research, Science and Technology Mr Machana Shamukuni has told Parliament that Botswana universities can be termed as comprehensive universities as they offer both under graduate and graduate programmes.

“Some of the institutions award master’s degrees and doctorates and public universities receive an annual subvention from government which enable them to offer graduate programmes. No one can dispute the fact that the funding was not sufficient,” he said.

He stated that he was aware that post-graduate student funding was one of the critical components to capacitate research institutions, noting that government had over the years funded post-graduate students essentially through in-service training.

“The government has established the Botswana Innovation Hub which currently manages the Botswana innovation fund,” said Mr Shamukuni.

He said the plan was to review the fund and broaden it so that it catered for both research and innovation, and still be managed by the Botswana Innovation Hub, noting that establishment of another agency to cater for national research funding would come at cost.

“As a result, we will for now not consider establishing a national research funding agency but we cannot rule out the possibility of doing so in the future as investment in research and innovation improves, beyond government financing,” he said.

Mr Shamukuni said there were several ranking systems that were employed to rank world universities that included: the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU); Times Higher Education (THE); QS World University Rankings among others.

He further explained that the different rankings considered diverse factors to rank universities such as number of full time enrolled students, number of students per staff, international students, and female: male ration. 

High ranking universities would have higher values in these performance indicators.

Botswana universities would therefore be ranked low because their indicators have very low values compare to other universities.

 He was responding to the Member of Parliament for Nkange Dr Never Tshabang who had asked him to give an update on the state of universities and whether he was aware that post-graduate student funding was a critical component in capacitating research institutions.

He also wanted to know reasons why Botswana universities were poorly ranked against Universities World Rankings. Ends