Remarks by Dr. Mamphela Ramphele
Managing Director, The World Bank Group

2003 Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD), Seattle, Washington, January 24, 2003

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today, on the occasion of the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans. It is both encouraging and right that your sessions here focus on the curricular agenda for this new century, as well as engaging students in society. For the students under your care will grow to leadership positions in the world, and this century will be defined by their work.

It is an understatement to say that the new century has started in a very sobering fashion. On the one hand, the last century ended with more people living under some form of democracy than ever before. The voices of civil society became richer and far more diverse, and communications brought all of us closer together. Yet, on the other hand, the same forces that have brought us together have also tended to make us aware of the issues and realities that increasingly separate us.

We’ve learned that there are no magic solutions to the intractable problems of the 20th Century – religious and ethnic strife, challenges to governments to meet the expectations of their citizens, and the increasing gap between rich and poor in a world of six billion people.

The ending of a century, much less a millennium, provides an extraordinary opportunity to consider benchmarks. These benchmarks can track our progress over time, and can also provide a starting point to gauge our common endeavors as we forge ahead.

At this point in our history, when we are now closer to the year 2050 than we are to the end of the Second World War, it is a time for us to consider how successful we have been as stewards of the world we inherited. We can take great pride in the fact that we have built on the commitment and foresight of leaders who gathered near the end of the World War in 1944 and created the Bretton Woods institutions and the Marshall Plan; leaders who had first-hand experience with the consequences of war and the challenges of peace, and who extended a hand to their former adversaries and helped them rebuild their war-torn countries.

But as we contemplate what we have done – the successes and failures – we must come to the realization that solutions to many of the challenges we face have sometimes escaped our grasp. There is no shame in admitting this. We have worked hard, and unselfishly, to conceive a better world. I stand before you today as proof of the positive impact that can be realized when people of good will join together with a determination that they will no longer tolerate an injustice to humanity. The world came together in the 1980’s to say no to apartheid in South Africa, thus setting the stage for a free South Africa.

Today, we face even more difficult times, and once again we must join together to meet the challenges ahead. As academic deans, you have under your guidance the weapon that will be our best hope for the future – today’s college and graduate students. For the simple truth is that, as solutions for this century’s problems are found, it will be these students who find them. It is also these students who will live with the consequences of success or failure.

It is reasonable for us to ask, when the world celebrates the dawning of the next century, what will be said about the profound challenges and changes of this one now beginning? Will it be written that a way was found to live in peace, with a broader prosperity shared by everyone? Will we have found a way to work effectively together to find answers to pandemic health problems? Will we have broken the constraints of illiteracy and guaranteed educational opportunities for all our children? Will we have reached a point of understanding that the differences between us – economic and human – are common challenges rather than barriers that separate us?

Our grandparents and great-grandparents probably asked similar questions at the dawn of the 20th Century, and many of their fondest wishes for us have come true, as well as many they could not even imagine. However, the century also brought global war, ethnic and religious conflict, increasing gaps between those with wealth and those in poverty, and discovery of new means to obliterate our planet.

As you contemplate all of this, you may consider the question of what those who live in poverty want from us. This is a fundamental question for anyone concerned with development. The answer is much simpler than you might imagine. The poor people don’t want our pity, or handouts; they don’t want charity. They want what we all want: safety, security, good health, a faith in their governments and institutions, and the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and – more importantly – their children.

The challenge for global development is not an exercise in providing charity to poor people. Rather, it is seeking ways to engage poor people in the resolution of their own problems, leveraging development assistance through working in partnership between all involved parties, and ultimately enabling these people to take charge of their own lives. In the 21st Century, education will be the key to achieving success in this challenge.

Until recently, many felt that there were two distinct worlds. The problems in developing countries did not affect those who live in the developed world. Developing countries, where five out of six billion people live on roughly 20 percent of the global GDP, were simply different from the one billion in the developed world, with 80 percent of the global GDP.

If anyone believed that there was a wall between these two worlds, this illusion came down with the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. There simply is no wall. In this century, we are all joined by trade, by finance, by communications and technology; by environment, by health, by migration, by crime and drugs, and certainly by terror.

In a world where there will be another two billion people added over the next 30 years, almost all in the developing world, the question of development becomes a question of equal opportunity. As the process of globalization – which has been underway for more than a century – accelerates, it presents the potential for a world which is more harmonized; access and equity will determine whether our children will live in peace.

Many in this room would agree, education will be crucial in the challenge to provide broad-based, equitable economic development. We are all in agreement that universal access to primary education is a vital first step. However, I believe that higher education is crucial in helping developing countries take full advantage of the opportunities of global trade, technology advancements and good governance.

Developing countries will simply have little success in boosting economic growth and reducing poverty unless they can close a growing “knowledge” or education divide between themselves and richer countries.

The World Bank has just recently released a new report, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, which concludes that higher education is central to closing this gap. This should come as no surprise to you, given your daily efforts to change Higher Education in your country. But for developing countries, these truisms need restating.

Tertiary education promotes economic vitality, reduces poverty, and encourages open and cohesive societies. In a global economy that becomes faster and more powerful every year, education can transform the development prospects of poor countries around the world, reducing poverty and boosting economic growth. Tertiary education stands out in particular as a key to that global economy which increasingly relies on the use of ideas and technology to find smarter ways of working and doing business.

A process of continuous educational opportunity can create a country’s intellectual and economic foundation, increasing its ability to acquire and use the new hi-tech knowledge and skills increasingly demanded by the global economy, and making the difference between a dynamic economy and a marginalized one.

Tertiary education provides not only the high-level skills necessary for every labor market, but also the training essential for teachers, doctors, nurses, civil servants, engineers, humanists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and many other specialties. It is these trained individuals who develop the capacity and analytical skills that drive local economies, support civil society, teach children, lead effective governments, and make important decisions which affect entire societies.

Universities are clearly a key part of all tertiary systems, but the diverse and growing set of public and private institutions – colleges, technical institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research labs, distance learning centers, and the like – form a network that supports the production of the higher-order capacity necessary for development.

While knowledge has become, more than ever, a primary factor of production throughout the world economy, the benefits have largely not been realized in developing countries.

The widening education gap between wealthy and poor countries is a major reason why five out of six billion people receive only 20% of global GDP. Helping these countries join the global knowledge economy is essential to closing this gap. Bridging the gap requires a seamless learning system that moves people from primary and secondary school, through university and other higher learning institutions, as well as workplace training which is important to update job skills.

In today’s world, product development cycles are being compressed, services are becoming a larger proportion of economic output worldwide, and computer power and capacity continue to rise as hardware prices and data transmission costs fall. Knowledge, in the form of ideas and technology, now drive the world economy. This requires policymakers everywhere to re-examine the policies and assumptions that underpin their provision of quality continuous education.

Countries that are able to take full advantage of the opportunities will be able to jump-start their economies and eventually have the opportunity to catch up with industrialized economies. The development of the knowledge economy can provide opportunities to address social issues including reducing poverty and social exclusion. Therefore, governments that invest in tertiary learning and allow people to prosper with their updated skills will be amply rewarded for their investment by the global knowledge economy.

Imagine, if you will, how different the global society would be if people throughout the world had access to higher educational opportunities, equal in quality and amount to what is available through the programs at your institutions. By any measure, this is not the case today. In OECD countries, participation rates average about 50% of the age cohort, while in developing countries, this amounts to less than 10% on average. In the US, the participation rate is 81%, while in Sub Saharan Africa it is only 4%.

Inequalities in scientific and technological capacity are also stark. Taking scientific publications as a proxy for research output, we see that sixty-one of the world’s lowest income countries, excluding China and India, have a combined 22% of the world’s population. Yet, they account for fewer than 600 published scientific and technological articles annually. Meanwhile, high income countries, who account for only 15% of the world’s population, publish close to 400,000 articles.

This is not surprising when you consider that the annual spending by the 29 countries of the OECD on research and development is greater than the total economic output of these low income countries—$500 billion spent annually on R&D, versus $470 billion in economic output by these poor countries.

Researchers in countries representing over 80% of the world’s population produce only 15% of published research outputs, while those in countries representing less than 20% produce more than 85% of scientific journal articles.

These figures tell the story of two worlds. In one, investments in research build and maintain an expanding critical mass of human capital that, mixed with the right complements, creates wealth and contributes to quality of life. In another, scarcity of the necessary infrastructure for knowledge underpins hosts of other material scarcities, and, partially as a result, resources are put to the low-cost, low-productivity purposes that characterize life in the developing world.

Today, a high quality tertiary educational system stands like a keystone in an archway of a modern knowledge-based economy. It must be supported by a strong and stable base, but it also gives shape and coherence to the structure as a whole. Countries that have achieved success in the new global economy have generally made a substantial investment in knowledge, with universities and graduate education systems at the center. They have built research systems that absorb between 2-3% of GDP. The results, in the most successful cases, have helped create or strengthen systems that pay back their citizens with a growing list of new knowledge, products and processes.

In the other world I mentioned, the one starved of the capacity to produce the knowledge it needs in the ways it is needed, problems persist. Over 800 million people do not have enough to eat. More than 1.3 billion people lack access to adequate fresh water, and close to 2 billion people do not have access to affordable energy. Diseases which are controllable elsewhere spread virtually unchecked, and inadequate healthcare and public health services are the norm. Poor indoor and outdoor air quality is commonplace, as is preventable environmental degradation.

It would be wrong and too easy to suggest that lack of knowledge is the sole cause of discrepancy between these two worlds. We know the causes are complex and solutions are multi-faceted. The degree of transparency and quality of governance in a country has a natural bearing on innovation and application of knowledge and wealth creation. Good governance and participatory democracy empower citizens to take charge of their own lives, fully accessing information and knowledge. The contrary is true of poorly governed countries. Often, when poor governments lack the capacity or will to provide adequate access to knowledge, radical interests in that society seek to fill the void through schools that emphasize inequity and division, rather than full access to knowledge and the means to use it.

Through a number of mechanisms, wealthy societies benefit enormously from their research and knowledge infrastructures, and the use of knowledge shapes the entire character of their societies. When it works well, higher education sits atop a complex set of intersecting interests. If any one part of the system is missing or defective, the system cannot function. This explains in part the alarming differences between low and high income countries.

If you agree with me that a widening “knowledge gap” between wealthy and poor countries will inevitably affect everyone in the global economy of the 21st Century, and if you can envision how different global society would be if people throughout the world had access to equal quality education, then the challenge going forward is clear.

Policymakers in developing countries must grasp the opportunities that higher education, in combination with knowledge networks and new technologies, offers for raising productivity and contributing to growth. The incentives are certainly apparent. Investing in tertiary education generates benefits to society – including long-term returns from basic research, technology applications and greater social cohesion – that are crucial for economic development. In addition, tertiary education plays a key role in supporting the expansion of basic and secondary education.

But appreciating the opportunity is not enough. In a world with the constantly evolving demands of the global knowledge economy, there is competition from new higher education facilities and their hi-tech teaching methods, as well as the labor-market pressures placed on countries due to the “brain-drain” effect of losing their highly trained professionals to developed countries in the west.

Here, as the promise of a new century unfolds before us, is an opportunity for American universities and the students under your charge to play an active role in promoting equity and a common future for the world’s children. In the process, American institutions and students will find themselves enriched.

I ask you to reflect on the traditional mandate of universities to pursue “teaching, research and service,” and I invite you to expand the notion of “service” to include all the many things that can be done to make access to quality tertiary education a feature of all countries of the world, thereby improving the quality of life in the developing world.

The concept of service must be broadened to include the service that one educational system can do to strengthen another. This must take place at many levels – students, professors, administrators, institutions, the state and regional university associations, national organizations such as this one, and within appropriate agencies of government. We must, all of us, move beyond “zero sum” thinking in this respect. Strengthening tertiary education systems throughout the developing world will provide worthy collaborators, counterparts, and competitors for those that are already strong. With close to four-fifths of humanity lacking access to quality tertiary education, we have an extremely long way to go before we exhaust the global supply of worthy candidates for study.

But a change of mentality is just the beginning. It is a beginning that should lead to increased sharing of ideas and resources between top schools and systems and their less strong counterparts. We have seen the pace of collaboration pick up between OECD countries and the middle income countries. But we have seen very little cooperation where it is needed most, among the fragile systems of the poorest countries. Conscious, explicit decisions to reach out and help strengthen tertiary education systems in the poorest countries are what is called for.

Much can be done to extend the spirit of collegiality, and the mutual learning about the governance of graduate programs and universities in general. The recognized strength of this country’s tertiary educational systems is the result of more than just comparatively abundant budgets and resources. It is also the product of thousands of daily struggles to organize and govern these programs and institutions as well as possible. Whether it be on the questions of faculty autonomy, career advancement, budgeting and resource management, or university-government-industry relations, a valuable experience exists here that your colleagues in the developing world are anxious to benefit from. While there is no single model, we know that university programs must learn, and begin practicing, the very best institutional governance possible. This helps them use scarce resources well, and takes them a step closer to the precious critical mass of organizational and intellectual talent that characterizes the best universities and graduate programs.

Because universities are typically the first places where promising young people have sustained, consequential interactions with the institutions that have been set up by their society at large, their experiences can form exceptionally strong impressions. A persistent problem in the developing world has been the lack of a strong, civic-minded and entrepreneurial middle class.

But, if the institutions that form the next generation of leaders are themselves inequitable, self-serving, bureaucratic, rigid and dilapidated to the point of collapse, what kind of graduates can they produce?

It is the parasitic relationship of the brightest students to their state and society that keeps some developing countries mired in poverty. These relationships are often formed, or at least solidified, in their dysfunctional universities. So, it is more than just additional resources which this new concept of service should encompass: it is a real partnership to strengthen governance that is also needed.

When great achievements have been made in the sciences, we often hear those responsible credit their success to “having stood on the shoulders of giants.” What I propose is that the strength of the foremost tertiary educational systems in the world become like those shoulders, creating a platform from which other countries can see a path to building their own steady and stable knowledge infrastructures. It is not only money and resources that will make this happen, but cooperation, collegiality and concern. So much can be done through simply sharing past experiences and current models – and refusing to settle for the stereotypes that poorer countries must naturally be lesser intellectual achievers.

Archimedes, the famed mathematician, is quoted as saying, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” His view was mathematical conjecture on the use of a fulcrum and the leverage it creates. But I would suggest that encouraging American universities and students to engage in a true interchange across nations and cultures would lead to mutual enrichment.

As we look forward in this new century, I believe that education is the fulcrum, and higher educational institutions are the lever, through which your students – the leaders of the 21st Century – will find a way to “move the earth.”