Higher education partnerships between the Global North and the Global South are a recognized as means of developing research and education capacity, especially in the institutions of the Global South. Due to the realities of individual agreements, however, not all partnerships work effectively. This article examines a Norwegian and Ethiopian…

This study investigates the impact of higher education on economic growth and is based on a sample of 18 African economies over the time period 1980-2015. The research makes use of a Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) framework to account for potential dynamic and endogenous relationship in modelling of the tertiary education-growth nexus. The…

The COVID-19 outbreak stimulated an outbreak of online learning in many institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Educational institutions went beyond fighting the COVID-19 through social distancing norms to tackling Sustainable Development Goal Four (SDG 4) with the adoption of online learning as the new modality for instruction. Online learning has…

This study was conducted to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the private higher education (PHE) sector in Ethiopia. The study employed a mixed-methods design and used diary and survey questionnaires as key data generation tools. The results of the study revealed that the pandemic has severely affected the academic and business operations of PHE…

Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa, has embarked on an aggressive mission to expand higher education opportunities for its populace during the past two decades. However, associated with this aggressive approach to increasing higher education opportunities is the dilemma that educational planners face of improving the quality of…

This article chronicles the key challenges facing Ethiopia as it embarks on an ambitious, ideologically-driven and aggressive expansion of its higher education system in an effort to address its national goals of economic growth and poverty reduction. It is argued that the urge for higher education expansion has placed undue pressures particularly…

Under the influence of the external policy pressure of donors such as the World Bank, higher education in Ethiopia has witnessed a series of institutional and system-wide reforms. This article reviews selected policy documents to show key neo-liberal policy agendas endorsed in the reforms and explicate how they have affected social equity in the…

In the context of low-income countries, the role of donors in public policymaking is of great importance. Donors use a combination of lending and non-lending instruments as pathways of influence to shape policy directions in aid-recipient countries. This paper reports some findings from a doctoral study on the role of the World Bank in the recent…

Cost-sharing as a policy in Ethiopian higher education institutions (HEIs) has been adopted since 2003 to achieve a set of objectives such as supplementing revenue as an alternative non-governmental source, maintaining and enhancing access to higher education, addressing equity in terms of opportunity in higher education and making students…

Most of today's societies are confronted with an increasing necessity to legitimate the organization of their access to higher education. Commonly used as a yardstick to compare societies, the level of access to higher education is often presented as an indicator of the level of development and the capacity to produce knowledge, as well as a…

Higher education participation in Ethiopia is very low (about 1.5 per cent) and is the major source of the critical shortage of educated and skilled human resource. The higher education system in Ethiopia is moving away from exclusive and dismally low enrolments towards increasing participation. To expand access, to redress inequitable subsidies…

The Education Working Paper Series is produced by the Education Unit at the World Bank (HDNED). It provides an avenue for World Bank staff to publish and disseminate preliminary education findings to encourage discussion and exchange ideas within the World Bank and among the broader development community. This Guide seeks to help those who design…

Based on the realization that the rapid worldwide growth of educational systems over the last two decades has not produced the expected eradication of social inequality, an international seminar was held for educational policy-makers, planners from developing countries, research workers in the area, and representatives of aid agencies from 33…