Digital and other divides

Globalisation is nothing new for universities, their very name stands for universal aspirations. The quest to discover scientific truth has always transcended national borders; and ever since the industrial revolution, it has been propelling economic development. Research and knowledge, above all, are what make the advanced nations so powerful. Quality education is becoming ever more important for success in the world market.

Networks of researchers in academia, high-tech companies and other institutions span the globe. Such ties can boost growth in quite different parts of the world. Silicon Valley in Northern California and Silicon Plateau in Southern India are inter-related hubs of technological advancement, and both benefit from exchange of experts.

Depressingly, however, our world’s information and knowledge networks still largely bypass poor countries. Mozambique, a country of 20 million people, only had 28 000 students in 2005. By comparison, the University of Münster has around 40 000 students – and it is only one of several big universities in the German State of North Rhine-Westfalia (NRW). With a population of 18 million people, NRW is home to almost 470 000 students, enrolled in 59 institutions of higher learning.

In spite of such glaring discrepancies, the global development debate hardly deals with higher education. There are many reasons, but donors’ fear of skills-based and brain-powered competition from poor countries is not among them. It is well known, after all, that top-notch experts from the Third World tend to migrate to the rich nations. They don’t threaten the rich world, they make it even more dominant.

Donors, however, do believe that spending on universities and colleges in developing countries will only serve the children of well-to-do families who can, in principle, fend for themselves. Internationally, the emphasis is on primary education. For good reason, the UN Millennium Development Goals stress the relevance of elementary schools. Illiteracy is, after all, an obvious symptom of poverty – caused by deprivation and causing more deprivation.

However, there is a snag. Primary education, in itself, does not lead to development. And if it is to be of good quality, there needs to be investment in teacher training. Similarly, vocational training also depends on qualified staff, and it will bear most fruit in those places where access to knowledge and technology lets businesses thrive. Moreover, it is not only engineers that matter. Any country’s health sector needs qualified staff, and so do other vital institutions from the civil service to the financial industries. But what about the many unemployed graduates in poor countries? Some argue that the push-factors of migration indicate that higher education is not what developing countries need. That notion is misleading. What graduates’ underemployment shows is that academic training must be geared to existing needs. It is not enough to merely re-iterate textbook knowledge from advanced nations.

Ours is not only an era of globalisation, it is also the one of the emerging knowledge society. Bridging the gulf between the haves and the have-nots will not only depend on investment in digital infrastructures. Beyond doubt, that kind of divide is relevant. But no hardware investment will ever really help, unless there are some clever people available who can make sense of information, rather than only operate machines.