Perspective Chapter: Higher Education Problems in Angola

*Adilía Mendonça da Costa e Silva* 

### **Abstract**

Higher education has extreme importance in the countries' economical, political, and social development. Since it has a fundamental role in a country's development construction in all its aspects and provides political and strategical support that a country requires for its development. Higher education tends to improve human resources capacity that is integrated with the several activity sectors of a certain country or region, adding to business fabric consolidation and technology innovation. And this makes investment in the education sector, especially in higher education, crucial. This paper's objective is to search for the main problems faced by educational institutions. To this end, based on the qualitative and descriptive method in which, through observation and interviews, information was collected, which after being analyzed with the help of NVivo, allowed to present a set of failures such as lack of investment, lack of management knowledge and planning on the part of managers of educational institutions, and lack of support for publication, among others.

**Keywords:** higher education, quality of education, investment in education, higher education institution management, Angola higher education system

### **1. Introduction**

One of the many challenges of African countries' is related to education quality search [1], such as Angola. Higher education quality is achieved through scholars' professionalism improvement and administrative officers' and students' ability to learn [2], being that lecturer's refinement and work conditions improvement are essential to higher education institutions' quality determination.

Higher education in Angola shows countless debilities, and the search for quality has been higher education institutions', as well as the government bodies', main goal. The way this search for quality has been made is constantly questioned by several elements connected to the teaching process, and also by general population. After the postwar period (2002), there was a growth of higher education institutions, without, however, improving their quality. Institutions are created with the aim of reaching as many of the school-age population as possible, but without taking into account the minimum requirements necessary for teaching with the desired quality. On the other hand, many students formed by Angolan higher education institutions are discredited by their leaders by labeling them as "students without quality" for given function, to the detriment of students from outside the country.

The aim of this chapter is to show some of the main problems faced by higher education subsystem in Angola.

#### **1.1 Angola higher education system**

Higher education development in Angola was conditioned for many years due to civil war that ended in April 2002. The first higher education institution in Angola (at the time Portuguese colony) arise around 1962 through Decree-Law number 44530, August 21st from Ultramar Ministry, and it was designated as Angola's University General Studies. The first courses were created in 1963 and were allocated in three cities:

*Luanda—medical surgical courses, power engineering, mining engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical-industrial engineering;*

*Huambo, former Nova Lisboa—agronomy, forestry, and veterinary medicine; and*

*Lubango, former Sá da Bandeira—pedagogical science.*

Around 1968, Angola's University General Studies are renamed Luanda University and in 1969 the first Luanda's university hospital was opened, where the medicine faculty operated. With the transition government creation, Luanda's University was decentralized in university centers Luanda, Huambo, and Lubango. And with the country already independent, in 1976 Luanda's University was renamed Angola's University, and in 1985 it is designated Agostinho Neto's University in honor of the first Angola's republic president, who would become the University's first rector.

Until 2009, the country only had one public Higher Education institution— Agostinho Neto's University—with university centers in the provinces of Cabinda, Uíge, Benguela, Huambo, and Huíla, and five private higher education institutions all located in Luanda. Back then, Agostinho Neto's University showed countless operating difficulties, such as infrastructure and courseware lack (Gaspar & Soares, 2021). The first private higher education universities arise in 1999, following the order: Angola's Catholic University (UCAN), Angola's Jean Piaget University (UniPiaget), Angola's Lusíadas University (ULA), Angola's Private Institute (ISPRA), and Angola's Independent University (UnIA), the first functioning only took place in 2000 (Angola's Catholic University).

Higher education expansion all over the country, as well as national boards training in several areas abroad, were some of the government embraced strategies, in the local development perspective of the region and the country in general. In 2009, through the Decree-Law nr. 5/09, April 7th, seven academic regions were created, based in Luanda, Benguela, Cabinda, Malange, Huambo, Huíla, and Uíge provinces, and in each province, one higher education institution, with the goal of the gradual increase of students that could have access to higher education. Therefore, with the war ending in 2002, it was verified that there is an increase in the number of students searching for higher education, going from 871 in 1977/1978 to 12,566 in 2002. Between 2002 and 2008, the number of students that searched for higher education differed from around 12,566 to 70,000 students, with annual vacancies offered from 850 to 8300. This fact led to the approval and creation of several public higher education institutions, especially private throughout the country, because the government could not match this higher formation search increase.

#### *Perspective Chapter: Higher Education Problems in Angola DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109376*

The Angolan government focused on the education expansion for a long time and forgot about teaching quality in the same institutions. Therefore, the institutions, especially private ones, arise without verification of the curriculum they presented, which was never in accordance with the necessary requirements for their functioning, many of them without appropriate facilities and without enough teachers to follow the several existing courses. And several other factors contributed to the higher education institutions' quality being relatively low. Among those are the teacher's lack of scientific investigation, as well as the nonperformed studies publication, the lack of suitable libraries and labs, internet resources lack, etc. The public higher education institutions continued to function mostly without their own facilities, and without lecturers, not even labs. The lecturers' number did not grow with the same rate the number of institution numbers and student numbers grew. For example, in 2016, regarding the public higher education institutions all over the country, a total of 26 institutions, there were 8758 lecturers (4650 graduated, 2917 with a master degree, and 838 Ph.D.) to respond to around 212,284 students, adding to the fact that most of them collaborate in private institutions.

A serious error committed by the supervisory body is the fact that they are constantly approving educational institutions' creation without an analysis or research of the market needs. In the 2001 national development plan, it was already talked about the necessity of surveys to the market and employers' needs regarding professionals profile that they required, so that institutions and courses were created according to the market needs and accomplish regular reformulations and adjustments in the existent courses curricula, depending on the changes that take place in the market, as well as seeking to include tutored learning in a real work environment, that is, internships in the courses last years and professionalizing and technical-professional training. The expansion of institutions was carried out and continues to be carried out without taking into consideration these aspects that are very important in the architecture of a country's education system and its development.

The Angolan state has been carrying out successive reform projects in the higher education subsystem for years. Any of these higher education reform projects in the country were conditioned by the nonparticipation of the main stakeholders of the teaching and learning process in their formulation: teachers, students, civil society, and unions. As a result, their constant failures were verified [3]. This author concludes that economic, social, political, and cultural transformations are the ones that affect the country's education system the most. That is, despite the existence of a decree that defends democratic management in higher education institutions, defining it as the participation of all actors in the higher education subsystem, including civil society, in improving quality, and respecting the norms in force applicable to them (Article 9 of Decree No. 90/09), it was only in 2022, after a series of demands by the teaching profession, that the process of electing the public higher education institutions managers in the country was carried out. As a result, it is expected that there will be effective collaboration and participation of all in the decision-making of higher education institutions.

It is known that in Angola higher education institutions worked at the service of the political agenda instead of their true mission, vision, and value, which has led them to face numerous constraints such as the lack of administrative, disciplinary, and pedagogical autonomy; scientific, cultural, and financial values; the lack of competent staff; and social recognition and appreciation of its mission [3], which places quality, the institutions' improvement, and the project's development as a challenge and also a strategy on the political agenda. This fact is supposed to change with the policy of

electing the higher education institutions' management bodies, but some teachers discredit it because managers are, mostly, partisan preventing higher education institutions' academic and scientific freedom. That is to say, the Angolan educational system has always been linked to the political system, in which the public higher education institutions' managers' functions have always been conditioned by the political power, since they were appointed by the supervisory body (Higher Education Ministry) that controlled all their actions, turning them into simple executors of the ruling party policies. For this reason, the higher education institutions' autonomy in Angola has always been legally recognized, but never implemented [4], as the State has always appeared as the guide and supervisor of the activities carried out by educational institutions. The Higher Education Science, Technology, and Innovation Ministry has always been in charge of the higher education policies management and execution in Angola and was oriented to access promoting and higher education massification.

Until the end of the academic year 2021/2022, the Angolan State took the main decisions relating to the academic process, besides controlling it, and higher education institutions had only administrative and financial autonomy, controlling the financial process according to the budget shares allocated to them [5]. According to Appiagyei-Atua, Beiter, and Karran [6] higher education institutions' autonomy level in Angola is 46.6% and is found in the set of African countries that comply with the required level of compliance with rights and individual freedom of 61.7%, with academic freedom of 70%. This is questionable since academic freedom has never been felt. However, Paiva and Campos [7] believe that the process of electing managers of public higher education institutions will provide some autonomy regarding the activities to be developed, allowing them to indicate their work cast and freedom for higher education institutions, allowing them, in some cases, to define their own laws. At the beginning of the 2022/2023 school year, the first elections were held in Angola at the public higher education institutions level, which gave hope to the academic community in terms of institutions teaching and learning process improvements, and mainly greater appreciation of the country class.

The purpose of this work is to take an approach to the main problems of Angolan higher education institutions, from the failures of the management of the guardianship body, the managers of the institutions themselves, to the teachers and students of the same. However, the research questions are:

