The Ethiopian social, cultural, economic, infrastructure, and political realities ought to be fully taken into account prior to the deployment of new management models.
By Wondwosen Tamrat & Damtew Teferra (Inside Higher Ed)
Dictated by the unprecedented demands of massification and other shifting trends, institutions are constantly under pressure to implement new management modalities. These developments have however created tensions between the traditional models of collegial governance and new managerial leanings. In this article, we examine how Ethiopia, due to phenomenal growth in its higher education sector, navigated this exercise.
Ethiopia has entertained a number of university reforms that involved, among others, the redesigning of policies, systems, and organizational structures. Key among these challenges was the reform of the management modalities in the public higher education sector—a shift that has drawn significant research attention. Research done on the universities of Addis Ababa, Aksum, Haramaya, Jimma and Mekelle, (all belonging to the old group of universities—except Aksum), focuses on the processes, challenges and outcomes of a variety of public management tools employed for steering university reforms. We draw on the findings of these studies in examining the nature of the reforms.
Rationales for University Reforms
When the Ethiopian higher education sector identified wider access as one of its major goals, the need for university reform was unequivocally established. If institutions were to respond to the evolving external demands, it was necessary to change the manner in which they were structured, governed and managed. Since the end of the 1990s, this have been new policy directions set by the government and aggressively pursued. However, given the very nature of universities—widely recognized as change averse—the choices were not that simple.
Ethiopian universities have embraced national reforms introduced within the civil service. The first came in 1997, in the form of Civil Service Reform Program (CSRP), in line with the changes from a centralized to a free market economy. Regarded as part of the civil service, universities were required to implement reforms to respond to the new demands of the sector. Although this was the first far-reaching step in questioning how traditional public universities were led, the inclination to use earlier CSR tools, like strategic planning, did not last long.
Another modality came into being in 2006 in the shape of Business Process Reengineering (BPR)—in keeping with the spirit of new public management theory whose influence was on the ascendancy. Introduced with new vigor, BPR caused huge upheaval across the country, generating again, the exigency of transforming public organizations, including universities.
BPR has been in decline since 2008, giving way to what is called the Business Score Card (BSC), Kaizen, and currently “deliverology”—an emerging business management approach used for managing, monitoring and implementing reform initiatives. Although these changes are presumably driven by the desire to improve efficiency, accountability and performance at all levels of the civil service, including higher education, the significance of this wave of management reforms remains elusive, and at times untidy. Hence, the need for a closer scrutiny.
Read the complete story at Inside Higher Ed
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