The proverbial Havard of Africa seems to be hell-bent on cementing its place as an academic power house in Africa if the latest university ranking is anything to go by. The Times Higher Education (THE) Africa universities ranking released on Friday of the top 30 universities in Africa places Makerere university in the 3rd position.
According to an online website M&GAfrica, the rankings are based on …the amount of citations there are for the university’s work. They are derived from the methodology for the current world university ranking, using the 13 factors (below), combining THE’s own enormous database of statistics along with the Elsevier’s Scopus database – a system that highlights some of the continent’s top performers in terms of how often research papers are referred to and cited by other academics globally. This methodology is designed for the research-led globally facing university.” Makerere university is the only Ugandan university that appears on the list.
It’s arguable whether the ranking position of Makerere will improve with the recent innovation in the form of the Kiira Muliima cheap tractor. One of the big surprises was the omission of several African universities that have consistently featured high up on global ranking lists. Namely; Cairo University, University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria and Al-Azhar University in Egypt.
The other surprise was the appearance of unexpected or lesser-known institutions, such as the Universite Cadi Ayyad (10), Port Harcourt (6), the Universite de Sfax in Tunisia (28), Universite Hassan II (15) and several other institutions from Egypt namely; Suez Canal University (14), South Valley University and Minia University (30).
Phil Batty – Editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings – explains that even though they have spent the last 4-5 years modifying and refining a methodology that would be better suited to an African, as opposed to a global, ranking – “ It’s noteworthy that the latest ranking is an improvement from the previous ranking where Kampala based university was ranked fourth out of the approximately 2600 higher learning institutions in the continent
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