Will the success of South Sudan’s top university hurt the others?

The pandemic was no less challenging for universities in South Sudan than for anywhere else in the world. Nevertheless, you could see the whole experience as just another rut in the extremely bumpy road that the country’s universities have traversed throughout their short history.

Indeed, South Sudan’s oldest and most prestigious institution, the University of Juba has emerged from the pandemic with its burgeoning reputation only enhanced further.

Established in 1975, Juba quickly became the joint second-best university in the whole of Sudan. However, its development was soon affected by the country’s long civil war, which began in 1983. When the conflict engulfed Juba in 1989, the Sudanese authorities transferred its university to the capital, Khartoum.

Relocation was also the fate of the two South Sudanese universities founded in 1991 as part of the country’s so-called higher education revolution. But all three universities thrived in the north. Juba, for instance, grew from a five-college institution to a fully fledged university, consisting of 21 colleges, specialised institutes and centres.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 allowed the establishment of two more universities in South Sudan – John Garang and Rumbek – as well as the return of the older three institutions. The relocation, however, was troubled. Many of the universities’ assets – buildings, libraries, laboratories and, most significantly, academic staff – remained in Khartoum to form the University of Bahri.

Hence, the returned universities suffered from lack of qualified staff, insufficient lecture halls, poor laboratories and limited accommodation for both students and staff. This led to a considerable backlog of school-leavers seeking university admission.

Through the ingenuity of its professors, however, Juba has been able to steadily overcome these challenges. To address the admissions backlog, for instance, it introduced a range of new admission routes in addition to the mainstream, publicly funded national pool, including routes for privately funded and mature students. It also instituted a rolling calendar, with recesses between semesters condensed to fortnights, shortening degree completion times.

The private entry route brought in much-needed income, which the university used to develop its facilities. It also put its weight behind a sizeable pay rise for higher education staff in 2018, thereby attracting many academics back into the sector. And it paid incentives to lure academics from elsewhere in the Horn of Africa and beyond. Although inflation has since markedly shrunk the pay hike’s value, the package is still within the regional range.

The presence of qualified academic staff permitted Juba to establish new specialist centres, such as schools of agriculture, petroleum, veterinary medicine and pharmacy. Alongside these came a number of postgraduate programmes, from diplomas to doctorates. Some of these are very popular with employers, especially within the dynamic and expanding NGO labour market.

Applying its new tagline, inventing the future-transforming society, the university has also opened community colleges, which offer undergraduate courses across the country.

Today, Juba’s staff and students enjoy 24-hour access to electricity and internet, which is unparalleled in South Sudan. This allows its lecturers to teach in the evenings. It also means that Juba was the only South Sudanese higher education institution able to deliver a distance education programme during the Covid lockdown, allowing students to continue learning. These developments have endeared Juba to the public, particularly prospective students and their parents.

Juba has even benefited from the influx of South Sudanese students from elsewhere in East Africa, forced to return home by the economic decline that followed a government decision in 2012 to shut down oil production in a dispute with Sudan, prolonged by the South Sudanese civil war and Covid-19.

Today, Juba has more than 29,000 students. But while it has flourished, other institutions have struggled to deliver their programmes adequately. The other four public universities, based on the University of California’s multi-campus model, were instituted to complement Juba and to prompt equitable socio-economic development in South Sudan. But, currently, these universities have fewer than 7,000 students in total.

Its community colleges notwithstanding, the question is whether Juba’s manifold successes are inadvertently strangling South Sudan’s other institutions – and undermining efforts to diversify higher education access across the nation.

Kuyok Abol Kuyok is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Juba.