impact support for higher education could have development in the region as we know attention has been drawn to the increase in elementary education and in particular  child however we really have to look at the totality of the education situation in order to have the leap forward that we're looking for the numbers related to higher education in africa telling according to the latest available data from the united nations educational science and cultural organization in two thousand and four there are over one hundred thirty million students enrolled tertiary education institutions were allied only three million of the students of the hundred thirty million were in africa this is not because africans do not want to attend college or universities as a matter of fact in my travels there i have never seen a area of the world where education is more sought even in refugee camps where people rather than ask for medicine or blankets or food wonder when educational system could be set up as we were asked when i first went to chad to dar for un refugees while the percentage of african students seeking degrees has risen very slowly from around one percent to five percent over the past forty years the gross number of students enrolling in african colleges and universities have grown dramatically over the past two decades as a former educator i am convinced that formal schooling at every level has a transformative effort in the lives of people in that country and research has shown the positive impact that basic education has on development especially when it comes to the education of the girl child the more years a girl stays in school as most of us already know the more likely she is to have less children to space them further apart to see them to see that they attend school resulting in a better quality of life for all concerned if she's better educated she can have more positive employment opportunities as we see many times women being steered into unsavory types of of businesses the united states is on the right track in terms of its support for primary and secondary education appropriating nearly seven hundred million dollars for programs in these areas this fiscal year i am concerned however that while we have focused on basic education we have another daughter communities have lost sight for both the benefits of higher education and the need to provide robust assistance for them for example from nine hundred eighty five to one thousand nine hundred nine seventeen percent of the world bank's worldwide education sector spending was on higher education at the world bank it was higher but from hundred ninety five to nineteen ninety nine the proportion dedicated to higher education declined to seven percent so from eighty five eighty nine seventeen percent world bank world wide education sector ninety five to ninety nine and we would think that progressively as we move forward we would see improvements but we have seen a decline to just seven percent such neglect has had extremely unfortunate consequences first we have not met the demands created by increased access to basic education the new york times published a story a year ago which details conditions at a university in senegal students live six to a room in facilities designed to house two they go to classes two hours early because there are two thousand students in a single lecture hall and if they arrive late they cannot sit close enough to hear the professor the article pointed out that and nine hundred eighty nine nineteen eighty four only half of the children in senegal a at primary school but now nearly ninety percent attend primary school and senate i went on to it went on the state that the african continent has the highest secondary school attend the growth of anywhere in the world the high growth rate has created two problems of course there are obvious one overcrowded classrooms at the elementary and high school levels due in part to the lack of trained teachers and administrators and to a sharp rise in the number of students completing secondary school who want to go to college and of course the higher institutions of learning cannot accommodate them the higher education system should be able to address both of these problems as the ad for mention example illustrates however africanus its oceans are having a hard time keeping up the second consequence of overlooking higher education is that we have missed the opportunity to build indigenous capacity to address global challenges africa as a region is the least equipped to deal with the crisis such as those created by  aids and other infectious disease the spike in the cost of food and climate change which all indicators show that africa will be the worst hit by climate change and africa has least to do with the conditions that create climate change as a recent article in africa renewal points out the region is lagging behind in the areas of science and technology africa's a home to thirteen point four percent of the world's population but only one point one percent of the world's scientific research researchers reside on the continent there is engineer or scientist per ten thousand people in africa in industrialized countries there are twenty to fifty ten thousand people in african countries have the lowest number of medical doctors per capita finally  relative neglect of higher education and by doing this we have failed to support a critical catalyst for economic growth and development the world bank paper published in two thousand and six shows area education can have a significant impact in the area of technological catch up which allows countries to maximise economic output and close the gap between developing countries and those that are more technologically advanced this man turn to have a profound effect on economic growth in the coming decades during the course of this hearing i hope our witnesses will address the current state of higher education in africa the potential benefits of increased s support for african colleges and universities what type of support should we be providing them and what potential pitfalls we should avoid as we look to strengthening our support for african institutions of higher learning i thank all the witnesses for coming today and this time i will move to introduce our first witness but before i do that i might ask my colleague john lady from  state of california she would have any opening statements  well so we will ask mr brad miller and he is anxiously awaiting the witnesses so therefore we'll turn to mr frank then more and i just like to say let me first of all congratulate you on your able to handle it this is his first appearance before the committee since the appointment earlier this year and so we certainly bid him a warm welcome career member of the senior executive service mr moore recently served as director of the office of environment and science policy within the agency's bureau for economic growth agriculture and trade prior to joining us idea nine hundred ninety eight mr more help positions in the areas of agriculture environmental and national resource management with the u s environmental protection agency where he was an international program specialist he was africa as a regional agricultural business specialist in zimbabwe the peace corps associate country director for agriculture in guyana and agricultural specialists and chief of operations for programming and training in usa mr moore also serves as a lecturer in  agricultural economics department at virginia state university and university of science and technology and committees gonna we are very pleased to have missed the more with us and be thank you mr chairman good morning to the chairman and to the members of the subcommittee it's an honor for me to speak with you today about this very important topic higher education in africa and the s agency for international development experiences in this regard might i request that my written testimony be submitted its entirety for the record and i will take a few excerpts from that testimony without objection thank you sir with regard to challenges i won't add much to what the chairman has already laid out for us the chairman has included such things as the fact that educated mothers are more likely to have greater incomes participate politically have fewer and healthier children to emy and eyes them and educate them he has also pointed out that given some of the changes that have occurred in basic education although there are still millions of children that are not receiving basic education it has improved greatly and this is increased demand for higher education because of the large numbers of people who are completing secondary education and the increased population with regard to challenges to african universities i would highlight that i think are critically important or not touched upon the first is that many universities have an adequate working relationships with the private sector and other prospective employers and therefore having difficulty training for a needs another area which was touched on lightly but i would like to highlight is insufficient applied and basic research capacity at african universities ways in which we can improve  given my time i would like to go on to give some examples and some information on usa support to higher education i would first say that usa effort can best b characterized as a combination of institutional capacity building participant training and collaborative research all of which are aimed at helping local institutions of higher u s support to higher education in africa provided the services of the offices of education and agriculture the bureau of economic growth agriculture and my former bureau i would also point out that there are examples where the office of development partners has included tertiary educational institutions several global development alliances  public private partnerships in africa and the global health bureau has supported the leadership initiative africa which is aimed at strengthening the skills of public health practitioners to development programs through human capacity building institutional strengthening program now called higher education for development or has implemented more than three hundred projects and between the national university of rwanda michigan state university and texas a and m university for a program called rwanda partnership to enhance agriculture through linkage this is a partnership that our mission was interested in undertaking and rwanda in the coffee industry as people might know rwandan coffee has grown to be one of the staple selections of coffee for two thousand and one to two thousand and six was intended to do as i stated earlier that combination of institutional capacity building participant training and collaborative research expertise at the university this project which was a part of has been followed up by a second phase that covers the period two thousand and six to two thousand and eleven seconds the  universities have switched texas and as the prime and michigan is the subcontractor this second award was a purely competitive grant  students who have completed master's degrees four of whom have gone on to ph d degree and these are way up to rwandan universities and the rwandan agriculture and provided approximately seventy nine million for capacity building relationships like the one just laid out in a variety of sectors i would point out that this figure likely underestimates the level of our support since a number of programs would not be captured now that we have moved fax system we feel we will be able to catch a situation where there are thank you for the chance to provide you with an affirmation thank you very much for that interesting update on what is happening and i think the importance of agriculture in africa seems especially in light of today's commodity prices and problems we ought to really focus more agriculture in africa because i think it's really under utilized at the present time but i just have a couple  had just over twenty seven thousand students enrolled in university twenty years later in two thousand and two that figure was one hundred twenty one hundred seventy two thousand net represents the more than six full growth in the span of twenty years similarly got i had only nine thousand college students in one thousand nine hundred five by two thousand and five there were over one hundred  and to how if at all have our aid programs been adjusted to help african colleges and universities meet the demand caused by expanding number of secondary school  completed a higher education conference in the last day of that conference was an interesting combination of chancellor from african institutions and those from u institutions i believe anecdotally that a fair number of them have mentioned the importance of now being able to draw faculty that is a combination of faculty trained outside of the country with faculty that is primarily trained inside of the country and have looked at the ability that brings in creasing their research and research that  actual needs of their populations and and problems as they see them because they are drawing faculty that have a mixture of experience so i would say that they have contributed greatly to a better understanding of what university should be doing that is probably closer to a model of universities that are state land grant universities education projects where we have a clear understanding that that capacity that scientific capacity really does require that there be people in the country on the ground to complete that as well as several programs that we have not mentioned the chris consultative research program which is an agricultural program that over the past ten years probably our estimate provided seventy nine million dollars worth of increased research capacity and partnerships between u s universities question would be this and then i'll turn to my colleagues according to advocacy organizations cancellation and foreign aid has helped put twenty million more african children in school this past decade than otherwise would have been able to go and of course we know this is our lot of men but as i understand it it has put some strain on the educational system as i mentioned earlier and some countries  how has the need for more teachers in the classroom packed and on a quality of teachers and teacher training need for so many and finally what assistance are we providing through education institutions to improve the quality and expand the number of teachers that we have in sub saharan africa let me start with the capacity question yes it is true that those who are completing secondary school and going on to university education has created tremendous strains and university education we do have i can give some anecdotal evidence of changes that african governments have made themselves if one looks at dawna there was  think much more detail at modern curricula for teachers primarily for secondary school but my understanding is that one of the reasons they made the change is so that they can also have some effect on curriculum and of them is increasing teacher capacity but i'm not sure that i can lay out that does that directly now for secondary education that's actually quite different from secondary education there are a variety of situations one which is a combination of partnership minority governments that are actually producing textbooks community a second would be what's going on nationally in africa third world wide i mean what are these kids learning to be in the international market or to be in the local market curriculum a colonial past but based in the past was not capable of keeping up with that combination of local national and global they feel they need to be competitive so i would say that that is coffee specialty coffee on one hundred points a specialty coffee is eighty points and above there was almost no coffee that was produced that was eighty points and if you look at rwandan coffee now  wanda what happens is that individuals leave for a point in time they are replaced while they are at home but the industry is expanding so much that when they come home there is a place not only for them but there continues to be a place for whoever now you said in your testimony that there were not for whatever reason not sufficient connections between the universities and the private sector in many african universities even with respect to the african equivalents of our  that judging from those who participated in the higher education summit that just took place that is a concept that africans are very familiar with i think that if one looked at those institutions that were which we are involved in it we've been involved in looking at some of our public private partnerships looking at universities in the united contributing to the advancement and enhancement of that type of institution why i'm afraid i can't answer that question i would have to come back to you with information i can tell you sort of that we do know the comparative cost between education africa and the united states it's program but i do wonder do wonder what countries have done a good job of trying to provide education for those people and at that level and and how the cause effect that that's  you ms watson would you like to ask a question  the mission to submit my remarks for the record please without objection yes mr moore welcome and thank you mr chairman for holding this most important hearing i missed most of your testimony but the question that lingers in my mind is our programs through us i've heard complaints in the past that by the time the funding trickles down there's not much there and are you finding that the overhead still absorbing most of the funds that would be able to develop programs in education in agriculture that's first and second is we were in the kingdom by focussing year before last is a kingdom with in the inside of south africa they discovered a platinum mine and the queen mother said that she was sending her young people to the west to be trained but in the meanwhile big western corporations are coming in there and trying to negotiate to take over those mines her vision was that the proceeds from the platinum would come to build a whole new city and to be able to train so can you update us on those kinds of programs in south africa where they're using their own natural resources and the profit t are private for profit implementers there are non government organisation implementers and there are college and university implementers in most cases where one is looking at college and university implementers i think that the nature of program lends itself well research training and capacity building partner organizations and that is the heart of the program so that is where the money goes i mean there is an overhead that the university would take for running it but that is the nature of the program i'm a little hard pressed to think of situations where one would say that because of overhead in a program that the money has not come down that would also lead to training when that training was a discrete object of the  program there may be some cases where training was not an objective of the program and as an afterthought people may have thought perhaps we should engage in some training or quite honestly may have learned in the course of doing the program we should engage in some training and try to maneuver the program around to accomplish a little hard pressed to think of a situation that i'm aware of where the amount of years ago in south africa that by the time and i'm not talking about in public and private u s sponsored programs that so much of the money went out i would need to do some research to come back to you on the second question i can think of a number of continent where people where governments are quite active national governments or local governments are quite active in looking at how they make use of their natural resources to build capacity both intellectual capacity as well as physical capacity  committee and i appreciate this particular subject matter because education has not been supplied freely in many of the countries but along the west coast and  maybe down in south africa if we could take a look at those countries that are trying to have a formal free educational system and maybe lying that much so we could see where we could do the most amount of good so maybe we could have staff look into those countries that are trying to build a public education system thank you very much thank you very much and there really has been a to bring the girl child into the educational system as you know in the past they were really eliminated and well let me thank you very much mr moore and to congratulate you once again on your new  of public research universities land grant institutions and state public university systems is two hundred fifteen members enrolled more than three point six million students award approximately a half million degrees annually and have an estimated twenty million alumni prior to joining the sol ject mr macpherson affairs and was president of michigan state university from one nine hundred ninety three to two thousand and four from april to october two thousand and three he took a leave of absence from that position to serve as director of economic policy for the call authority of iraq working with the current the central bank the ministry of finance and the banks of the country he is the founding co chair of the partnership to cut hunger and poverty in africa chair of the board  dr babo was a research economist at cornell university in ithaca new york tonight hundred eighty nine and ninety four he spent five years i'm allow in various capacities he was a senior food policy and visor t malawi minister of agriculture ministry of agriculture developing a national level food and nutrition information service and evaluation and economists for unicef allowing working to design food and nutrition intervention programs coordinator of the unicef security program in malawi for the past eighteen years dr babu has been involved in institutional and human capacities strengthening for higher education and research in many many countries in south africa including nigeria mozambique ethiopia kenya uganda and south africa our final witness a neighbor of mine in new jersey ms moore and mclean is president and chief executive officer of the african american is the oldest u s based nonprofit organization concern strengthening human capacity in africa through advance that education and professional training mrs mclean joined from the ford foundation where she worked on the message and international programs occupying several posts at the ford foundation including deputy director for africa and middle east programs and west africa representatives in lagos  mclean serves on the university board of trustees a top graduate also from that university and the board of directors of the u s international university in nairobi kenya very good to see you with us this mclean d investments and human resources all those studies are there but i think it's easier to understand that when you think about how to build a country we all know roads the training and education it takes to have a judicial and law enforcement system that is ethical and sound the overseeing just kind of a practical nurses the doctors culture is who who helps modify the technology or national technology if you will to the local conditions corn incidentally needs a little different kinds of corn and in kenya verses and zimbabwe i mean these are all very technical things that are sophisticated society we take for granted but of course we invest a lot of money into them to maintain complaint so that the case it seems to me for a vibrant strong higher education system throughout the continent is very strong and it's really critical building block to to build modern investments into the millennium global goals development goals delivering more and more goods and services and health and so forth and i think those investments are very important but we haven't focused nearly as much as i think we should have and i believe you're hearing today and movements around the country and world rebalancing that some that we we haven't put the resources into into human development and education beyond the primary education which we are so important in investing in so i wrongly endorse the concept of greater five the number of students in higher education in africa went up almost six times almost six times and that in that twenty year period but you can see the tidal wave coming projects put in place a human resource component for all projects as practical this is this is a huge change gets done this way because it's moving back into this human resource develop beyond the primary education very large component possibly of a very significant manner i in fact support for doing this important work in a lot of places this committee first and foremost but i foundations around the world getting back and i look at goldman sachs one hundred million dollars announced a few days ago for business education i'm very happy to see that pepfar authorization that the house passed recently include a provision for educating thousands of people to be done is practical in african universities with advice and assistance from u s universities as appropriate  all this is beginning to come together at the beginning stage i will be the beginning of big things in my belief and i am here today to strongly endorse it is true that the u s government will be a lot of other players and i believe not just the u s but the u s government has an important role we had a history going from point four days of the early fifty's well into the former justifier mentioned were very good projects but there was we've dropped away from the commitment and i hope we get back into we also during four decades we were training thousands of people here in this country for higher education graduate work in fact in the mid eighty's we were we had about fifteen thousand people your we brought to this country for this advanced education last year it was about a thousand so for a range of reasons not necessarily thought out or certainly intentional over decades the u s government has program backed away from significant human resource commitments with the march exception being a primary education program and i think we're getting back into that and the pendulum is began to swing the world is beginning to see that you can't build a country on but then very little commitment on the part of the african governments but i education in terms of sending that institutions partly because of the financial strain and partly because of the low public expenditure on education and of course we talked about the education partly because of the space infrastructure of learning facilities that are poor now the current challenges that african institutions are facing in iraq occasioned systems two sets of interventions are necessary one how do we help the institutions that are already in the process of reforming themselves to meet the current challenges that a lot of institutions within the countries what taking those steps and how do we help them in order to meet the cost of education and also to become financially viable that's one set of interventions that we can think about that second set of intervention relates to the quality of education that had education quality as deteriorated in the last twenty years and when i was teaching almost eighteen years ago they were teaching materials that were twenty years war in agriculture schools partly because the libraries do not have quality materials they do not have current editions of books  the intervention bit more in detail in terms of helping the countries to reform themselves we're not going to be there forever to fund them at one point we have to lead themselves trainable how do we help those countries who are already thinking about reforming the systems so that they can meet the challenges themselves one way to do that is identify the rhino's what already running in that program i can mention few universities for example in the kind of support that we would like to think about so that ten years from now we don't have to be helping all the countries in africa the second set of supporters shot them but we win those that we can get out of the support how do we increase the credibility of the youth public universities in africa so that they are respected in terms of quality one we can help with the helping the library facilities for example quickly help to abrade the libraries quickly support them in terms of internet connections so that faculties have a connection to the rest of the world who don't load the materials from mit how to harvard where the public materials that are available they go to materials that are a little online but the local universities do not have the capacity to interact with the rest of the world and that's something that we can quickly help with we can also think about helping them to meet the demand the increasing demand that we talked about in new modes of delivery of education why not distance education where not even in colleges we talk about the community colleges but we're not even in colleges that the same facility could be used for that people are already employed but can upgrade their education we need to think about you learning programs for the universities but these are also m making opportunities for them to sustain themselves in the long run then we need to talk about how to improve the quality of education that the partnership with us universities utopian universities that are already taking place need to be sent in and  in various fields that are audiences haitians and associations in africa that are coming up how do we send them this professional association so that they feel part of some growing dibble associations so that they stay in th jobs conduct research and do good teaching another aspect that we could help with one of the witnesses mentioned this morning is supporting the search without good research programs the universities just based on teaching are not going to be cannot do it in every university but we can do it in selected you know with at least one unit was the leading countries could be a knowledge center for connecting to the industries locally as well as to other universities that are coming up i just want to mention about the private institutions that are coming up mostly in from the religious side based on more or less the community colleges that you talked about and they have focused on business management secretarial assistance and to build capacity for the to request permission as well to submit my written of remarks for the objection i was asked to respond to five questions and in the interest of time i will just touch upon them in my oral presentation the first two questions have to do with the state of higher education in africa and the major challenges facing institutions there and  raising here african higher education was not always in the bad state that it is in today it's important to stress that i think most newly independent african nations in the early fifty's regarded higher education as critical for the development of their national economies and for political and social cohesion and so they made a stab wishing universities and colleges a priority and they were often starting from scratch because the colonial powers left very little things began to deteriorate in the late seventy's with economic decline trades in terms of trade worsened dictators power and this is also very important political context because very frequently these dictators had no sympathy for universities which were guarded as insistence of major multilateral and bilateral donors who felt sensually that higher education was a luxury these countries could no longer afford but to make matters  worse in this declining state there was this increase in enrollment and so for example the world bank reports that between nine hundred seventy five in one nine hundred ninety five and romans in higher education institutions in africa increased ten fold so they went in this period from very elite institutions catering to highly qualified high performing students to ones always in my written remarks what i have concentrated on in describing the state of higher education and the challenges confronting institutions today are many variables that have already been discussed the gro ratio there is also something called the school life expectancy indicator which is a measure that estimates the number of years a person is expected to receive the education that they are expected to receive in any given level primary secondary or tertiary as you would expect in north america and in western europe the school life expectancy indicator for institution there's also been reference to what's called the outbound mobility ratio which is the extent to which african students are likely to seek tertiary education abroad and in this instance africa has the highest rate three times the global average with a mobility ratio of five point nine percent and this of course is a function of the infamous brain drain which i will  return to later on in my remarks and there are many other indicators which as i say have always also been referenced these are not new challenges they have been building over the course of twenty years when again higher education was largely neglected by african governments and largely at the behest of the international donor community that brings me to my the third question i was asked to cover which is what types of support should the international community provide to higher education institutions in africa again i feel compelled to ask forgiveness of those who are impatient with history but to provide some context the topic of this hearing was as relevant fifty years ago as it is today is a long  tradition of u s interest and support for african higher education and indeed the organization i have the privilege to head the african american institute was established and became prominent during this early period so since ninety three education for africans and about africa has in our focus we work with some four hundred twenty one partner institutions worldwide including higher education and professional training institutions spread across five continents africa australia europe north and south america the goldman sachs program was reference for example and i will be an administrator of that program for the africa  component and we have many other programs that are underwritten in the main by private companies private foundations and individuals fifteen percent of our support comes from overhead recover bodies that were the main sources of american support for african education at all levels during the early fifty's our government discovered education as a potent weapon in the logical cold war and mainly from kenya to enroll in university programs the airless alone had a profound impact on the scope and direction of u s government sponsored scholarship programs for african and from there on the focus was both public diplomacy and seeking to increase the human capacity to address poverty and other conditions on the continent to more than a decade and three successive white house administration special efforts have been taken to increase africa's policy profile but despite all of the attention to africa the overall portion of africans involved in  term programs but while exchanges and training represent only one of many foreign policy tools and resources they are particularly important means of u s engagement with africa given that africa's human resources  resource needs and the mutual benefit of increased u s africa relations are so great and they have a bearing on the effectiveness of other foreign aid assistance so that if we want pepfar  and all these other initiatives to maximize their potential we have got to invest more higher order that brings me to the fourth question which is are there potential rather impoverished vision i heartily agree and i offer this quote from one a south african university professor to illustrate the point she says education is now widely acknowledged as the resource needed to expand our knowledge base and to discover the new to exercise our intellectual capacity to extract meaning from our world expand our social and intellectual horizons to gain skills and knowledge which in turn can add value to our natural surroundings the educational opportunity provided to me by most if not all of these beneficial factors but most important education coupled with international experience liberated me from the inferiority complex including greater technological advance political stability successful entrepreneurs and  study abroad does not inevitably lead to a permanent loss of talent from the continent and obscures variations in the international flow of human capital and it applies a double standard because often the for time immemorial which is to expand their horizons the intellectual frame of reference for africans as for other intellectually curious people around the world is international as well as local and in fact analysis of human capital flows revealed that although people may leave home they don't necessarily do so permanently and even when they do permanent residence abroad they are likely to contribute to improving conditions back home in significant ways this is t commissioned of some forty years of u s investment in long term training programs found that it was one of the best investments the united states government ever made in a host of ways and that in particular brain drain was not worsened by the major contributions participants made in their home country institutions and sectors multiplied opportunities improve the learning environment and raise hopes for young upcoming professional in our experience spanning fifty five years the greatest potential pitfalls of increasing aid for african higher education derives from the economic dependency of african the odds of programs will not accurately reflect african priorities will incorporate in appropriate u s models or will disproportionately serve us based rather than african interests and further our experience is that the question of what ought to be the substantive field or sector will focus has been particularly prone to disagreement and that sometimes tension between donors on the one hand directly relevant to economic development and less interested in providing support for example research and scholarship in the arts and social sciences but i doubt that any of us here in this country notwithstanding our view that  market competitiveness is important would want to eliminate those things from the choices that we have in higher education and furthermore we should recall that for example it was african intellectuals and scholars who having analyzed and understood the problem of the state who introduced the concept of governance that is the need to focus on state society relations and the accountability of african governments to their nations citizens into the lexicon of the world bank in development circles generally it was not always considered inappropriate consideration and this is one among many significant intellectual contributions that african social scientists have made to the development discourse and practice in spite of rather than in collaboration with sponsors and technical assistance providers the fist question and final question what benefits to the continent could the united states could us support for the expansion an improvement of colleges and universities this is a good place to conclude because the directs our attention to future possibilities there is not a single development challenge facing africa markets that does not cry out for some form of capacity building almost six decades of official u s support for tertiary education africans have your important lessons and i'd like to call your attention to t one is that higher education is not the enemy of basic education and is in fact essential for quality education over all and the second is that long term training is a yacht high heeled investment for the united states as well as for africa in the case of higher education and basic education several other witnesses have discussed the importance of training for teachers which is a function of advanced education if we're going to have teachers on the continent who are equipped to strengthen the pipeline through which students will flow to higher education institutions we have got to invest in their training so the practical reality is that higher education is the highest leveraging point for strengthening performance all along  the education pipeline higher education investment for africa and for the united states and the benefit that we drive is something that we don't always focus upon particularly in our discussions of africa few american educators would disagree that the depth and quality of intellectual inquiry and the diversity of social interaction on american university campuses is greatly enriched by the presence and involvement of foreign faculty and students including those from africa the greatest problems facing the globe exist in parts of the world particularly africa that possess the lowest levels of capacity in terms of skills and resources needed to address these problems for us higher education institutions to maintain their global competitive preparing young exploration of a set of issues with far reaching implications for african development u s africa relations and global education and again i thank you for the invitation to share   also and it's if there are any kind of of programs or ideas or incentives that we might do in order that they spent a lot of money training and nurses and putting them through elementary secondary school and then into you know a professional school and as soon as they graduate many go off to various countries and that is the more opportunity there is to stay the more people will stay and in fact come home we're getting a lot of asian folks going back to korea taiwan and so forth in the last few years because of opportunity in short this is a chicken and egg in some senses undeveloped brain drain you've got to do the develop to you're going to experience some brain drain and you will probably begin to balance off the problem in time as i say i i really think it does make sense to you that you have to have it how you're going to have a glass half full or two thirds away full or or just nothing and if i can add to that one of the reasons why the professionals want to go abroad to study it other than study locally is the quality of education or at least that perception of quality of education locally and even if you offer scholarships for example in the university of malawi they would say i'm not studying it i want to get that you have to get a utopian beginning because that's valuable that's high quality so one of the things that we could do could be used to build the quality of the education locally so that people have confidence in that i had education system which means we need to the ways that make it more meaningful under eleven contextualize them and that to quest partnerships and that is so much of built up knowledge in this country for example in diet education system that are available on the internet and so on how do we tap how do we bring partnerships at the national academic community you know actual leadership of the country to the global community is in fact to prevent some brain drain i neglected to say that while i don't think that brain drain is either a horrible thing or something that can be prevented altogether that in our programs we have a ninety percent or higher return rate and that has to do with certain kinds of interventions and ways of approaching this first i would say that although i think study abroad opportunities ought to be made available that  the return is highest if you focus post undergraduate are experiences that undergraduate are more likely than others to not go home partly because like other people around the world that's a point in their lives where they don't have family and professional ties that are likely to keep them in one place so a greater focus at the master's and ph d level really does increase exponentially the likelihood that people will return home  it also helps to ensure that the big of the school but it's not just that you're handing a check but this is part of a comprehensive program which helps individuals to sustain links with institutions and other professionals in their field at home assurances of employment help significantly and as other but i have mentioned access to global sources of knowledge and to other professionals the through the information technologies is another key addition thank you very much let me ask my colleagues  i was just sitting here listening thank you mr chairman to your recommendations and suggestions and wondering how do we get a hold on this through the programs that we would sponsor knowing that the need on the cotton it varies according to the region you're in one of the things that concerns me right now is the world food supply and i think next we can a group of us are going down to haiti because we know that condition there right here in our hemisphere and i'm thinking about our efforts in africa would you say and i all three of you to respond to this should we develop a realistic educational program through us to meet the current needs to  hunger worldwide but particularly on this cotton that would you think that we ought to support agricultural development education along  great initiative but certainly out of opportunities for trade should be the benefit to the people and higher education clearly is if you will the stairstep two opportunities let me put on the record my concern and i am very grateful that primary and secondary education is improving and on the continent and that we have overcrowded classrooms i'm grateful because children are wanting to learn but i also want to put on the record that that is an important issue we have to address particularly as i understand it that primary and secondary education is still feet driven when you travel to the continent many will indicate  that they are not even able to go to that level because they cannot pay for books and fees and otherwise so i hope we embrace and i believe we are bracing all of these issues as relates to higher education i'd like to hear your thoughts on the utilization of the african union and whether or not you have any knowledge whether they have a component that responds to the global needs in higher education for the continent it seems that that would be a very good partner for us to have my second question is i am knowledgeable well the educational system in nigeria and ghana in particular they have had institutions of higher learning for a very long time not as for me it was south africa just imagine because of its sophistication it would be to what is the course pollin as a nation meaning bringing students from other african countries to places like nigeria and ghana helping them to expand  insight please don't hesitate dr bill thank you that's a very useful question really how thought about regional centers of excellence because not all the countries could be excellent in every field so one way to tackle that and even in the countries that we are dealing with capacities are scattered there are some excellent chemists and few universities and some other universities we don't have any chemistry professors what examples so how do we combine this capacity that is seen on the ground into form for example regional networks of purposes could actually teach in a regional basis and that is what one example is african economic research consortium this is for the economics field and they have come together to automate themselves bring the talents within africa to each wider range of countries who can get together in one place and that is the center of excellen approach that could be done in nigeria in ghana in nairobi and out of that i would that be feel like but that's it i totally support that idea and it does what and in that process we can build in the next ten years ten to fifteen years capacities that are of the unfortunate ironies is that there's perhaps less cross pollination occurring today than they occurred fifty years ago a good portion of the aging professoriate are people who were trained from  east africa from southern africa as well to nigerian institutions for example and dar es salaam tanzania and so forth but but there is nevertheless a lot of energy and interest and there are fo us on the continent for people in universities to collaborate across borders the association of african universities based on across several sub regional associations i know that the southern  african university chancellors are a very active group there's even a group emerging of private institutions that are fee based so there's a lot that's already taking place that we could help to support and i would hardly urge that we not recreate the wheel and we look at what people are already a focus upon and if only while congress watson is still here i'm going to be the one contrarian to some extent on this issue of focusing  nevertheless there are some real things to learn some lessons from our own states there are only some twenty one or two vet schools in this country and of course we've got fifty states there's a lot of sharing  vet school graduates around because that schools are so expensive to run having run one in michigan state i can tell you about those costs that same concept is a plausible number of years  national international borders is a real concept i would i would make one last quick comment here about this mr chairman i'm convinced that the explosion of higher education in africa  requirements is going to force consideration of different maybe a lot different delivery models of higher education  are learning to perhaps thank you mr chairman thank you to witness thank the witnesses with their responses let me thank the witnesses very much  realize that there needed to be expansion and as you know malaria has really been stepped up to maybe almost three billion dollars and the the  extreme in multiple drug resistant tb but in addition to that we were able to craft in a nutrition component which was excluded in the original authorization because of the fact that  we need nutrition and we were able to get a component to deal with water and sanitation in the new legislation and so we've been let me thank the witnesses we are going to move forward we have a goal of attempting to get higher education into higher priority here and africa continue to work with the organizations to assist us as we move forward to try to create the legislation necessary for implementation meetings and