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The Inter-University Council for East Africa and member states from the East African Community need to address the issue of poor quality of education in private universities operating without minimum requirements. Members of the East African Legislative Assembly are concerned about those “quack universities” where students are tricked into enrolling but later fail to graduate after the universities have closed. This is the case of Kampala University, which opened a branch in Juba but closed without informing students, leaving them stranded.

Two vice-chancellors and a former Rwandan prime minister were accused of nepotism and mismanagement of university finances. Three private universities were shut down by the Ministry of Education from 1 July 2020 after failing to meet education quality standards and to pay staff, despite strict rules for students who are required to pay fees before being admitted. The Higher Education Council will continue to evaluate institutions regularly and take action against universities with similar cases before schools reopen in September.

Many institutions in Australia provide training programmes for their Ph.D. students but these programmes vary in quality, content and reach. The temptation to judge a researcher’s performance for grant funding by the number of published research papers and the focus on the quantity over quality is very strong. They are not just driving bad behaviour for researchers but are also creating a market for criminals to enter scholarly publishing.

The Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science, and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University conducted a study on the quality of South Africa’s research publications, which includes predatory publishing. 4,246 South African papers published in 48 journals were found to be predatory. Several studies suggest that some academics are falling into predatory publication traps due to the pressure to publish, get more grants and boost their academic reputation.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan last week ordered the removal of a number of university vice-chancellors because they were appointed in violation of the merit-based system. In stern remarks on 22 April over the appointment of vice-chancellors in Punjab province, Pakistan’s Chief Justice said “The Supreme Court cannot tolerate any appointment without transparency as the state of education in the province is in complete disarray,” and that the appointments were not the most senior professors but had close links with government circles.

A new report by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has revealed how most allegations of corruption in federal universities have neither been thoroughly investigated nor punished. The report titled: ‘Stealing the future: How federal universities in Nigeria have been stripped apart by corruption’ said: “Impunity for corruption in the university system has negatively affected the governance of federal universities and the quality of education received by the students.”