Session 5 – 12th April – 11.30-12.30

Title of Presentation:       Widening Access to University Education in

                                             Anglophone Africa: Problems & Prospects

Authors:                           Akpovire ODUARAN, Ph.D

                                           Choja ODUARAN, Ph.D

Organisation:  University of Botswana, Faculty of Education, Gaborone, Botswana

Summary:

Widening access to university level education in Anglophone Africa has been moving away gradually from rhetorical optimism and terminal naivety to the realm of political actualization of collective intentions of community modernization and growth. This is so because university education is being deconstructed to embrace the welfare, self-actualization, socio-economic and even political reconstruction of Africans, especially the poor, such that they do not remain the objects but effective subjects of change at the local and global platforms.

This brief paper examines some of the ways in which Anglophone African nations have been widening access to university education in the midst of the challenges posed by poverty and massive sudden deaths arising from the HIV/AIDS pandemic plaguing the continent.