East Africa may have the most educated population in Africa, but certainly not the best educated.

Although the gross enrolment ratio (GER) for universities in East Africa has risen from an average of 0.3 in 1970 to about 3.6 in 2010, private sector employers and chief executives have said that our universities do not meet their needs and those of the larger society.

A recent study conducted by the Inter-University Council of East Africa (IUCEA) in collaboration with East Africa Business Council (EABC) showed that 56 per cent of students graduating from East African universities lack the basic and technical skills needed in the job market.

Another report, Africa Business Agenda, published by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2012, showed that 201 CEOs interviewed unanimously said that university graduates can pass exams, but they cannot think for themselves.

According to the CEOs, two of the most difficult groups of employees to recruit and retain are middle-level and senior managers.

READ: Over 50 per cent of EA graduates half-baked

So, for the sake of the taxpayers and families who spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on higher education, a renaissance in undergraduate education in East Africa is urgently needed. And it will take audacious reforms led by governments.

Four imperatives underpin the need for reform.

First, the world we live in today, unlike that of our forebears, is intensely connected, more crowded, evidently warmer and beset with a worrying scarcity of vital life support resources such as clean air, fertile soils, food and clean water.

Moreover, in Africa, and especially in East Africa, the centrifugal, fragmenting effects of ethnicity, radicalism, religious extremism and blind nationalism now threaten social cohesion, governance and local and global stability.

Second, the challenges and opportunities that East Africa faces today — the youth bulge, weak educational systems, rapid unplanned urbanisation, inequality, biodiversity decline, extractive sector boom, and food security — demand that our decisions and actions be driven by knowledge, information and innovation.

In a dynamic and complex world, education and knowledge are increasingly becoming the foundation for — and drivers of — economic, social and institutional growth. Universities thus influence the economic competitiveness of individual nations and regions.

Third, this is an extraordinary moment for East Africa. While the region is beset with challenges, it is home to four out of the 10 most rapidly growing economies in Africa.

Our place on the continent and in a globalised knowledge economy will be determined by how we educate the current and future generations.

We need to educate our own scientists to create Africa’s unique Green Revolution. East Africa needs engineers, biologists, ecologists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists to deal with the impact of climate change. We need politicians, journalists and civil servants who can navigate the complex diversity of our region.

Lastly, our universities must produce captains of business, leaders of government and stewards of civil society, who will lead Africa’s renaissance and find solutions to its most urgent challenges: Governance, poverty, hunger, malnutrition, civil strife, climate change and environmental degradation.

Redefining the purpose

A fundamental first step in reforming undergraduate education is to define what purpose undergraduate education must serve in the economy.

Undergraduate education ought to prepare students for the future by building capacity for curiosity, critical thinking and imagination.

Undergraduate education ought to produce scientifically and culturally literate people who can assess evidence, connect the dots and communicate with clarity. In a dynamic and fast changing globalised world, such capacities prepare young people for careers that do not yet exist.

Consider that about 200,000 East Africans who will join university this year will be retiring in 2060. We have no idea of what the world will look in a couple of years, much less in 46 years, yet our universities are charged with preparing these youth for life in that world.

Undergraduate education must recognise the imperative for developing skills and attitudes to meet the extant and emerging problems.

The decline

The quality of undergraduate teaching in our universities is deplorable. There is a moral failure among our academics. Faculty has too much power and they pay too much attention to their research and private consulting and too little attention to undergraduates and advising and mentoring.

But is the problem entirely located in the moral values of the professoriate or are there fundamental economic and market forces at play here? You decide.

Across our universities, there is no pressure to improve undergraduate learning. The general neglect of the fundamental purpose of undergraduate education could explain why faculty has no clue on research on student learning and exhibit no interest in issues of pedagogy.

Most university professors, especially the really bad teachers, regard teaching as too simple to require formal preparation. Most graduate students who become professors have learnt to teach by emulating their professors, and, believe me, most of them are pretty bad teachers.

There is also a disconcerting reluctance among senior academic leaders, deans and vice-chancellors, to commit to a systematic and sustained effort to improve the quality of undergraduate education.

Our universities have no appetite for learning through a continuous process of improvement by internal or external evaluation of their performance.

Re-designing curriculum

How should we prepare the next generation of leaders? How and what should we teach? Reform must begin with the institutional model of the university and how the curriculum is organised.

The infrastructure of honour in universities is predicated on deep specialisation by gaining a PhD. This then creates kingdoms or jurisdictions called departments. The process of obtaining a PhD is through learning more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing.

These academic kingdoms present one of the most critical barriers to knowledge integration and learning effectiveness among undergraduates.

The absurdity of hard and fast disciplinary lines is that problems of the real world do not present themselves neatly as biology, religion, history or economics.

What is required then is capacity among undergraduates to transcend these arbitrary barriers and acquire the tools for critical thinking and problem solving. To achieve this, we must re-organise how we design and deliver undergraduate classes.

Faculty must unlearn the bad ways of disciplinary hubris and embrace team teaching and walk the talk on interdisciplinary approaches to research, teaching and learning.

The curriculum must be liberated from the tyranny of the course book and content. Teaching and learning must be thematic, driven by experimentation, discovery and problem-based approaches.

Accountability

We must hold universities accountable for cost, value and quality. Without resorting to externally imposed accountability systems universities should be encouraged to develop specific and clear goals for student learning and to collect objective, and verifiable data about how students are achieving their learning goals, across all undergraduate programmes.

Ideally, the results of such self-assessment should be made available to prospective students and their parents.

But, as people who pay taxes and tuition, we can ask for more. Universities, through high quality teaching and research, can create well-paying jobs by expanding research while linking academic programmes to entrepreneurship and business development.

The influence of higher education must be felt beyond the lecture theatre. The influence of the university must be felt in homes, businesses, streets, parliaments, farms and parks.

Undergraduate education is about preparing young people for a lifetime and for an unknown future. It is about preparation for citizenship in a global society.

East Africa’s great inventors, business and civic leaders must emerge from our universities, ready with open minds to lead.

I believe that if we continue with business as usual, paying lip service to quality, the East African moment will be lost.

We will rise or fall by the quality of our undergraduate programmes. No railway lines, roads, power lines, harbours or airports will substitute for underachieving undergraduate programmes.

Dr Awiti is the director of the East Africa Institute of Aga Khan University.