Relevance of the Triple Helix conference to
Higher Education and Development in Ethiopia

Higher education is increasingly being recognised as a critical aspect of the development process, especially with the growing policy awareness about the role of science and technology in economic renewal. While primary and secondary education have been at the focus of donor-community attention for decades, higher education have been viewed as essential to development only in more recent years. Today’s economic circumstances make higher education a more compelling need in Ethiopia than it has ever been. Some key factors are: increased demand for higher education due to improved access to schooling; pressing local and national concerns that require advanced knowledge to address; and a global economy that favours participants with high-technological expertise.

Economic development is largely a process by which knowledge is transformed into goods and services. In this respect, creating links between knowledge generation and enterprise development is one of the most important challenges facing Ethiopian universities. It is now more important than ever for Ethiopia to make concerted efforts towards moving ahead in scientific and technological development at an advanced level. In so doing, Ethiopia will be able to build local capacity that can help solve the many science and engineering-related problems they currently face. Ethiopia will also be positioned to take an active part in the technicians, and craftsmen are the bedrock on which SMEs (especially in operations and maintenance) are founded. In this respect, the expansion of vocational institutes and polytechnics in Ethiopia is very important. Universities can be used both to adapt advanced technologies to solve local problems and also to move abreast of the research frontier in special areas and to transfer local innovations from abroad. A broad-based research university or multiple interacting knowledge- producing institutions, with strategic investments in emerging research areas with economic potential, supported by government initiatives, provides the basis for this shift.

Recognising the higher education as a critical aspect of the development process, especially with the growing policy awareness of the role of science and technology can play in economic renewal, the government of Ethiopia is investing in higher education as a strategic input into the development process. The FDRE is rapidly diversifying and expanding tertiary education training opportunities. New universities are founded and old ones are re-oriented for this purpose to increasingly become the source of regional economic development. Recently, there are encouraging signs that enrolment at all levels is rising. In addition, the equity and quality issues are being addressed.

However, university-industry linkages have always been very weak, especially in terms of institutional forms. They still constitute one of the main weak points within the national system of innovation of the country. Potentially a powerful vehicle for development, universities are vastly underutilised, particularly with respect to science and technology. If both universities and industry are encouraged to work actively together, the former will be able to assume new roles that could accelerate regional and national development.

There is a strong need for transforming systems of higher education to make them relevant to development challenges. Reshaping universities to perform development functions will include adjustments in curricula, changes in the schemes of service, modifications in pedagogy, shifting the location of universities, and creating a wider institutional ecology that includes other parts of the development process. In order to assist universities in adopting a key role in development, national development plans will need to incorporate new links between universities, industry, and government. This is likely to have an impact on the entire national innovation system – including on business firms, R&D institutes, and government organisations.

This will also require changes at several levels of university administration to render these institutions more effective as key development partners. This will require as well deep changes in enterprise, private as well as public, so they can become strong demanders of the capabilities nucleated around universities, helping to transform said capabilities into capacities. In this regard there is a need to assess the emergence of academic entrepreneurship during the transition from the old planned system in terms of the peculiar weaknesses and requirements and of the specific way in which transition has affected research institutes.

In the face of profound changes, there is an urgent need to bring together University, Industry and Government to discuss the traditional approaches to these three institutions aimed at redynamising the role of university services in order to better equip the universities to face the changing socio-economic and political conditions in Ethiopia. A conference was therefore necessary in order to initiate the above process.

Methodology

Expected Outputs

The conference synthesized local and international experiences as a useful first step toward focusing attention on innovation involving potential partners from academia and industry in the discussion. This entailed an analysis of gaps in the innovation system and the identification of concrete ways of filling them. Success cases and the circumstances that fostered them under varying conditions in different countries were examined and the transferability of available solutions examined.

Universities in Ethiopia

Currently there are several established Universities in Ethiopia. A number of these were actively represented in the Ethiopia Triple Helix conference
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Additional Documentation

2. An overview of some of the Visions and challenges concerning Higher Education in Ethiopia.