Although Leadership and Management training courses are available in African Universities in generic forms, few address these specific needs. The main thrust of the project is to develop leadership, management and cross-cutting professional competencies of university managers and lecturers, and through exposure, of policy makers. This involves four action thrusts:

• Strengthening leadership and management competencies of university senior managers, including aspects of financial management;
• Building cross-cutting professional skills, focusing on personal mastery/soft skills (PM/ SS) for lecturers and junior university staff;
• Identifying and piloting international good practice approaches for efficient management of university programmes;
• Enhancing partnerships for effective networking and institutional change management.

Objectives, Outputs and Activities

The overall objective of the project is to contribute to sustainable poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa and accelerated achievement of MDGs. The specific objective is to enhance capacity of universities in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) to engage in innovation processes in leadership, management and cross-cutting professional competencies development. Improving capacities of university managers and leaders will enable them to gain key skills in facilitation, management, team-building and communication and develop competencies to master themselves better in a changing environment.

The main approach to implementation will be through short skills enhancement courses tailored for the focal institutions and managed over a three year period in a learning frame. The training will be enhanced through mentoring and professional networking within the sub-region. The process will require an iterative set of short learning sessions, followed by practice and lesson sharing periodically.

The action seeks to support on-going efforts by RUFORUM to build adaptive university management structures in its member universities. It also builds on the Africa-USA Higher Education collaboration, the FARA NARS assessments which called for new approaches and innovative initiatives to address critical human and institutional capacity deficiencies in African universities and research systems. It is thus complementary and will build synergy with the FARA programme on Strengthening Capacity for Agricultural Research for Development in Africa. Additionally, the project is complementary to efforts of the Association of African Universities’ Programme on Mobilising Regional Capacity Initiative to strengthen networking among African HEIs. A key component in these efforts is that of strengthening leadership and management of HEIs in Africa.

Sustainability

Several strategies will be employed to ensure sustainability, including:

• Main-streaming the action in the university system by involving university management in the design, monitoring and evaluation of the programme;
• Developing a pool of trainers by training a critical mass of committed persons to scale up the programme;
• Developing a scaling-up strategy, as part of the evaluation process with a variety of stakeholders, which will involve bringing other universities and partners on board for nation- and region-wide impacts;
• Linking to other similar initiatives and policy frameworks that foster institutional reforms and enhance inter-institutional collaboration.