The Vice Chancellor of Kyambogo University, Prof Eli Katunguka, has called for increased funding to deal with the financial challenges that have prevented the institution from supervising more postgraduate students seeking PhDs, a trend he says is threatening the future of research and innovation.
Prof Katunguka explained that learners in developing countries like Uganda struggle for six or seven years to finish their PhDs, whereas it takes about three years for a student to complete doctoral studies in developed countries. His call came ahead of the university’s 21st graduation ceremonies set for today and tomorrow.
‘The main limiting factors are two, one is financial. Our PhD students are self-sponsored and struggle to look for money. Some are sponsored by organisations. Sometimes they find it difficult to keep pace with the payments of the university, and that causes them to lag behind,’ Prof Katunguka told Daily Monitor in an interview yesterday.
‘Another limiting factor is the capacity to supervise PhD students. We have been working on that as a university to improve our capacity to supervise PhDs, but our capacity remains low.’
The 21st graduation ceremony The graduation ceremonies will see the university obtain degrees for 5,138 students; some 1,981(39 percent) of whom are female, and 3,157 (61 percent) are male, in various disciplines.
Of these, only 23 are PhD graduates (12 are drawn from the School of Education; four from the School of Art and Industrial Design, while a further three are from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and four from the Faculty of Science). Prof Katunguka said the number of PhD graduates at Kyambogo University has increased from seven last year to 23 this year. However, inadequate staffing at the university remains a challenge for the institution’s PhD programme. He added that the cost of training a student to PhD level depends on the course one is pursuing. Science-based PhDs are more expensive than those in the humanities at Shs9m per year.
This compares to Shs5m for PhDs in the humanities disciplines. ‘In order to train more PhD students, we must hire people at a higher level. We need professors, associate professors and senior lecturers with PhDs,’ he said.
‘We have been trying to review the capacity of the university at those levels to be able to supervise graduate students, both masters and PhDs.’ However, Prof Katunguka said Kyambogo University has an ambitious staff development programme and currently, the university is supporting some staff members on their different PhD programmes in collaboration with other universities in the region.
‘We’re struggling with staffing in this university because the level of teaching staff is about 37 percent and that is low. We have been working with the government to increase the level of staffing to about 50 percent, but we are not yet there. The biggest number of professors is at Makerere.’