Edward K Kirumira was a professor of sociology and former principal of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Makerere University (MU) in Uganda, a position he held for five years. Before that he was Dean of MU’s Faculty of Social Sciences for eight years. Kirumira studied at Makerere and Exeter Universities, as well as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was awarded his PhD by Copenhagen and Harvard Universities.
His own research has focused on population and reproductive health, and he has conducted extensive interdisciplinary research on HIV/AIDS, emerging diseases and international health issues. He is a fellow and former treasurer of the Uganda National Academy of Sciences, and chairs the Academy’s forums on health and nutrition and on the prevention of violence against children. Kirumira has years of experience in working with donors and donor-funded programmes. While at MU, he was involved in how the university managed its relationship with Norhed, as well as in the Norhed-supported Water and Society Project, WaSo, which involves collaborative research across eleven partner institutions, four each in Africa and Asia and three in Europe. This interview took place in South Africa in December 2018, just before Kirumira took up the position of director of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
Tor Halvorsen (TH): In this interview, I would like us to focus on the Norhed programme, and the kind of university co-operation it tries to enable. I want to draw on your experiences at MU and in Norhed pro-jects run from that institution. With a total of 14 Norhed propro-jects, MU has been among the most successful institutions in obtaining support
from Norhed. I know you have been closely involved in two of these projects; I am interested in how you see the Norhed programme gener-ally and how you assess the value of the programme for MU in terms of knowledge development. Can we start with your own experience?
Please explain why MU was awarded so many projects and say what you think the institution has gained from them?
Edward K Kirumira (EK): To start with a broader perspective, MU has been supported by the Norwegian government for quite some time. We were beneficiaries of both the NOMA and NUFU programmes (described in the preface to this volume). So, in a way, MU was well positioned when Norhed was set up. One of the conditions set by Norhed was that applying institutions had to have a Norwegian part-ner. From working on the NUFU programme, a number of us had quite extensive networks with Norwegian universities and that helped us a lot. For other institutions, finding partners in Norwegian universities was actually a bit of a problem. But MU’s history with NUFU, and our work on the Nile Basin Research Programme that was funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, probably made it easier for MU to submit competitive proposals. In fact, MU won 13 out of the 46 projects that were offered, and was also part of one more that was co-ordinated by Khartoum University. So, yes, in total, we secured Norhed support for 14 projects.
The fact that we got several projects also allowed us to invest a bit in a central co-ordinating platform. Although this ran into some difficulties later, initially it enabled projects to develop a conception of a broader, more meaningful connection with the university, and its administrative system. So, right from the start, those involved in the Norhed projects got a sense that they were part of a process of institutional capacity building rather than simply recipients of individualised project support.
TH: If we look at the basic idea of the programme: the money was to go to the South, and the Southern partner had to find a partner in the North with whom to develop an application. You mentioned that some projects found it difficult to find a partner, but MU had a long-term
relationship you could build on. Do you think this new way of giving the Southern partners the power to decide on both the content and budget allocations of projects worked? That is, did this allow MU to apply to create the kinds of projects that the institution saw as rele-vant? And did you find Northern partners were able to work well within this new system, or did project partners tend to fall back into the old ways of working?
EK: I think in the case of Uganda the new system worked to a great extent. But having gone through the experience and had time to reflect on it, I can see there are some inherent weaknesses in the approach.
First, it assumes that the Southern institutions will find a Northern partner. However, this can be difficult if relationships haven’t already been established, as applicants had a fairly short time in which to respond to Norhed’s call for proposals. Indeed, some of MU’s own pro-jects faced this challenge and therefore couldn’t submit proposals.
Second, it assumes that Southern institutions have the capacity to competitively evaluate a large and diverse body of proposals – to self-evaluate in a way. However, self-evaluation, especially in a competitive environment, tends to be a bit dicey because, often, the people who are applying are also part of the evaluation process in some way.
In the case of MU, certain sensitive moments occurred in which one could feel that the self-evaluation process had simultaneously become part of a competitive process. So, the extent to which you can have a truly objective self-evaluation system within a Southern institution is potentially risky. This is especially true because Southern institutions are operating in such resource-constrained environments. Virtually everyone in the institution would like to be able to gain access to the funding stream, and, in some instances, the adjudication committee included people who had not been able to qualify to compete in the call for proposals themselves. In fact, I think this tension has existed within the MU–Norhed Institutional Development and Implementation Committee since Norhed was established, and this might have limited the effectiveness of that committee.
TH: Are you saying that the academic selection committees that Norad set up to evaluate the applications for the Norhed programme created some contradictions locally because projects were evaluated according to criteria that were different to those MU would have used if the insti-tution had set up its own selection committees?
EK: I think so. I think the situation created contradictions. For me, the lesson is that the Southern universities have to build more robust grant-management capacities, and ensure that they have relatively senior people to take part in institutional self-evaluation processes.
Instead, the MU–Norhed Institutional Development and Implementation Committee included some relatively junior people who still needed to benefit from this funding stream. They were asked to withdraw from funding applications if they agreed to join the Committee. So, yes, the process created some tensions between apply-ing for and beapply-ing part of the projects versus beapply-ing part of their administration.
TH: Should we rather be giving donor money to organisations like research councils that are located and governed in the South, and which could have committees to evaluate projects like those that Norhed wants to support? Would that be a better way of empowering the South? In the current system, as you indicate, control suddenly shifted back to Oslo. That is, Norad set up the selection committees to evaluate projects using a mix of criteria that were determined partly by Norad and partly by academic requirements. But ultimately the committees were controlled by Norad’s programme committee.
EK: I think what you suggest would be better in Uganda. As you know, MU has helped to build capacity to establish other universities – the country now has about six public universities and some very strong private universities are emerging. This means we can start to set the stage for some kind of national research council that would make it possible to shift the selection of projects to the South in a more funda-mental way. As things work now, we are still more or less dependent on
the existence of good relationships between academics or academic institutions in Uganda and Norway.
Uganda’s National Council for Science and Technology tends to be more of a regulatory body, and has not yet had a funding component.
However, I am not sure if this organisation should be turned into a national research council because regulatory and funding functions probably need to be kept separate. Nevertheless, a similar organisation would enable us to transcend the institutional politics that would occur were it to be placed within that institution. Perhaps we need to consider working with both the National Council for Science and Technology and the Uganda National Council for Higher Education, and creating a body that is inbetween the two. The challenge is, I don’t know whether we have created enough capacity to manage such an entity and prevent it from being ‘captured’, if we can use that expression. However, we and our donors definitely need to think about a possible shift in this direction.
TH: Institutional capture by certain interests is, of course, a danger anywhere, not only in Uganda, but if such a council had existed, MU would not have needed a Norwegian partner. But let’s go back to the rule that you had to have a Norwegian partner, do you think that influ-enced the nature of the projects in any way?
EK: I know of at least two, maybe three, projects on which this rule really had an impact – it actually transferred the project back to the Norwegian partner institution. For the majority, however, I think there were, and are, tremendous gains to be made from building the capacity of the Southern partners to manage not only the research process but also the budgeting and administrative components.
My project experience was special in this regard. The WaSo Project in which I am involved had an institutional administrative office at MU – the MU/UiB office – through which we had already developed close ties related to common projects. So, in a way, our Northern partners were able to operate very easily in the ‘South’; they had a platform at MU, and through this platform we could work with them. I see this as
an ideal model for long-term collaboration between universities. For projects without this advantage, I am sure it became ‘convenient’ to have the co-ordinating office in the North. In other words, project administration is a challenge in Norhed-funded projects, but it is something worth focusing on as part of the empowerment of the South.
TH: Do you think any academic ‘recapturing’ took place, or were project leaders in Uganda and at MU able to use their Norwegian links without being transformed by them so to speak? In other words, is the old story still operating or, if we talk about decolonising knowledge, is this the way to go?
EK: Well, an unintended consequence was that, unlike NUFU projects, not many Norhed projects had strong research components. For this reason, younger Norwegian researchers did not find the project attrac-tive and few young Norwegian scholars took part. Instead, a good measure of older scholars were involved who were, so to say, more open to letting the Southern academics lead. Many of these older scholars had worked in the South themselves, and were less inclined towards
‘academic recapturing’. Instead, they saw themselves playing a facilita-tive or mentorship role. This was really unintended so one cannot say that the programme, in itself, led to a shifting of power to the South.
And, actually, I think among the Norhed programme’s major problems so far is that it lacks a strong research component and that so few younger Norwegian scholars took part in it.
That said, however, some projects did express frustration with the Norhed model. This was especially so for projects that had relatively few partners – say one or two partners in the South and one partner in the North. Where projects had several partners, the frustrations seemed to be more diffuse. For example, the WaSo Project had three partners in the North and eight in the South. The only way we could manage was to share and distribute power relations everywhere. In cases where just one Norwegian university works with several Southern universities, the tendency is to rotate around the Northern partner; in those situations, power has not shifted.
TH: So, are you saying that stronger South–South links give you a big-ger network, and this helps transfer the research focus to issues relevant to the South? And have your experiences of South–South networking been good?
EK: Yes, we have had very good experiences with this. Even in problem-atic situations like South Sudan, or the occasional challenges that arise in partner institutions in the South, we were able to distribute the problem across the partners and, in a way, find solutions in the South.
For example, we could send PhD students to Kenya or Uganda, or even Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Cambodia, so you could actually distribute and increase capacity building efficiency. This would have been slightly more difficult if our project had involved only MU, Juba [University in South Sudan] and a university in the North.
TH: Do you think Norhed should drop the requirement that a Norwegian partner be included?
EK: Norwegian partners are beneficial. Our Norwegian partners came in handy when we had challenges with internal university systems, especially with procurement. But there are several reasons why I think it would be nice to continue to have such partnerships. Many universi-ties in the South undervalue our own home-based graduate training.
And unfortunately, scholars who are wholly trained in the South are often expected to prove themselves unduly in terms of the quality of their education. In this context, Northern partnerships help add legiti-macy and, more importantly, they provide avenues for greatly needed networking.
TH: Of the 90 MU professors we interviewed, I think only one or two of those who have a PhD had received it wholly from MU.
EK: That is correct. My wife earned all three of her degrees at MU, but, in the process, she worked with three other universities, two in Europe and one in the US. It more or less works so that when you get to a point where you are ready to sit and write, you can go somewhere where you
have better access to literature and senior scholars and such things. To say that your degree, or part of your degree, was at such and such a place abroad is still seen as prestigious. So, I think the continued inclu-sion of Norwegian partners is good but should not necessarily be a precondition for funding.
TH: But you also mentioned that it was good for procurement and for
‘development aid’ kinds of things. This implies a combination of Norad and Norhed; or rather, a combination of academic partnership with development assistance. The combination seems to work well in this case. However, it is still important to ask: do you feel that the develop-ment logic has been too strong in any way? That is, has Norad pushed too many of its own ideas about what its support should lead to in terms of development? Take this idea of capacity building, for example:
what kind of capacity are we talking about?
EK: I think there has been a tension on several levels. One was the ten-sion between the NOMA and NUFU conceptualisations of the Norhed support. Another is the appreciation of capacity building: are we talking about institutional capacity building so that our institutions are more relevant to society or the more traditional building of an individual’s capacity where the emphasis is on increasing the number and quality of PhD and master’s graduates?
The reporting structure for Norhed projects has changed over time.
Initially, reporting was done on the assumption that projects should show how they were building capacity that would enable the university to be more relevant to society. However, the focus of the projects often ended up being on enhancing PhD or master’s programmes, which kept bringing the projects back to the traditional idea of academic capacity building. Given that MU was asked to support the University of Juba, I think the emphasis tended to revert back to building the capacity of individuals and maybe a bit of South–South mobility. But even then, South–South mobility was structured around PhD and master’s students rather than on broader institutional development or societal institution-building through what you could call an educationalisation.
TH: I agree that the research component, in the sense of research as a product you can make relevant for actors in society is downplayed a bit.
But, isn’t the strengthening of academics crucial for enabling them to later have more influence on society? Or how do you solve the chicken and the egg question here?
EK: Yes, if there is one thing the Norhed programme can lay claim to, it is the establishment of platforms and networks of academics that then have more impact in sort of a second phase or third phase. In a way, now that we have project partners as far away as Sri Lanka, for example, we have all these Norhed-crafted groups and multidisciplinary teams of academics in the South working with all these different themes, sub-themes, such as Democratic and Economic Governance; Health and Equity; Education and Training; and Natural Resource Management, Climate Change and Environment.
So, I think the issue was that we assumed that the influence on society would happen during the three or four years of the programme’s life. But if we acknowledge that the aim of the programme was to enhance the capacity of institutions in the South to be able to do [rather than just do], then the Norhed programme has definitely been successful. However, in the reporting structure, you find yourself having to account for ‘how has this impacted on national politics and policies’ for example, and you really have to struggle to find evidence!
Very strong intra-institutional thematic areas have developed as a result of the Norhed programme, and a critical mass of interdisciplinary academics, or different disciplines working together, can now actually engage. I think the capacity for Southern universities to engage in knowledge creation/provision for policy has definitely improved. The question, for me, is how we can maintain this momentum. When you look, for example, at the level of publications produced over the three
Very strong intra-institutional thematic areas have developed as a result of the Norhed programme, and a critical mass of interdisciplinary academics, or different disciplines working together, can now actually engage. I think the capacity for Southern universities to engage in knowledge creation/provision for policy has definitely improved. The question, for me, is how we can maintain this momentum. When you look, for example, at the level of publications produced over the three