Despite being one of the highest paid employees in the country, the teaching staff still complained of low salaries. Many staff were particularly concerned about the loss of housing benefit (from 2006 onwards), since the cost of private housing was very high. As a result, an academic career was not financially attractive.
People do not want to come. Salary is too low. Even if they come, they don’t stay. We had very good technicians. They only stayed six months, nine months, they found another job and they left. Salary is too low. They can come for interview but if they are told the salary, they don’t come.
Lecturer VIII But their packages, their salaries are very low. Even myself, I was receiving 1400 [in MK, equivalent to about £5.60] all the way from here [i.e. Lilongwe103] to Blantyre to teach. Just imagine.
A part-time lecturer
At the same time, recruitment and retention was made even harder by fierce competition from private sector and/or international recruitment.
103
The distance between Lilongwe and Blantyre is approximately 310km and the cost of petrol was about MK250 (or £1) per litre when this interview was taking place. Therefore, the pay was not enough to cover petrol costs.
We trained someone in biochemistry. We trained them in Manchester at PhD level. They came, worked for us for a year, and left and went back to Manchester. And when we asked them to pay back they simply said no.
We produced 700 nurses a year. We lose 300 nurses a year. The net gain is only 400. How could they expect to fill 16,000 required nurses with this kind of training?
Dean of Undergraduate Study
Staff establishment in many departments at CoM was thin (see Appendix VII). At the DoP, only nine positions were approved and five filled at the time of
fieldwork. As mentioned above, the pharmacy curriculum used by the DoP has similar contents with a British undergraduate pharmacy degree programme. That means the same amount of teaching applies even though with a smaller number of teaching staff. Meanwhile, the criteria for academic staff employment were also modelled after the British template (see Table 5-5). For instance, a PhD in Pharmacy was a requirement for recruiting academic staff at or above the level of senior lectureship. There seemed to be an expectation to educate pharmacy students using similar capacity, in terms of curriculum and lecturer qualifications, as that of Britain. However, domestic capacity might fall short of this expectation. Indeed, Britain has been more flexible in employing academics especially in shortage or developing areas like pharmacy practice without PhDs.
Position Main responsibilities Qualifications/ experience required
Professor Head Department and
academic teaching
PhD Pharmacy plus 7 years teaching and research experience Associate
Professor Teaching and research
PhD Pharmacy plus 5 years teaching experience
Senior Lecturer Teaching and research PhD Pharmacy plus 3 years
teaching experience
Lecturer Teaching and research Masters degree or PhD
Assistant Lecturer Teaching and research Bachelor of Pharmacy Honors
degree Chief Technician Heading laboratory section
and conducting lab sessions
HND Laboratory Technology plus 5 years experience
Senior Technician Conducting lab sessions Diploma in Laboratory Technology
plus 3 years experience Laboratory
Technician Conducting lab sessions Diploma in Laboratory Technology
Laboratory
Assistant Lab sessions Certificate in Laboratory
Technology
Table 5-5. Academic qualification required for academic staff recruitment at the DoP, CoM. Source: teaching manual, Bachelor of Pharmacy programme.
Because of the low number of teaching staff, some areas lacked expertise and lecturers could not simply ‘cover’ areas they were not familiar with.
Consequently, some lessons were missed and sometimes the entire module was not delivered. This problem was brought up by the pharmacy students. Three focus groups were conducted with students ranging from year 1 to year 4 (see Table 5-6). This complaint was repeatedly raised in all focus groups; hence it is believed that this issue should be concerning pharmacy students from all years (see Table 5-7). According to students, the lack of laboratory work forced them to do rote learning, by just memorising facts without actual understanding. In some cases, rote learning was also caused by poor teaching quality, for instance using PowerPoint presentation slides that are downloaded from the internet. Also, teaching also was rarely conducted outside of mass lectures. There were very few assignments given; and almost no continual assessments (such as quizzes) carried out. Therefore, shortages of lecturers lead to not only a shortfall in quantity that can be taught, but also in the quality of the education.
Date of focus group Number of students
02/06/2010 7 (5 first-year; 2 second-year)
09/06/2010 3 (1 second-year; 2 fourth-year)
10/06/2010 4 (all third-year)
Total 14 (5 first-year; 3 second-year; 4 third-year; and 2 fourth-year)
Table 5-6. Focus group interview dates and number of students interviewed.
Year of Study Number of student (male/female)
1 16 (5/11)
2 19 (3/16)
3 20 (7/13)
4 16 (5/11)
Total 71 (20/51)
Table 5-7. Number of students studying pharmacy course (Year 1-4) at the CoM, UNIMA, during academic year 2009/10.
Source: Registrar Office, the CoM.
5.3 Conclusion
Capacity problems faced by the UNIMA are similar to those discussed in the literature of African higher education. These university-wide problems affected the individual schools and departments directly, resulting in staffing and funding restrictions. At the same time, capacity problems faced by the DoP are not discipline-specific. This means there might not be a need to investigate capacity issues according to disciplines. Instead, lessons learned from faculty retention in general (and in the context of SSA) may be applicable to the DoP. Facing burning problems like unavailability of lecturers for the entire module, in the next
chapter I shall explore if there is any innovative solution to expand the teaching capacity in the shortest period possible. It will be enquired if stakeholders’ resources can be mobilised to assist institutional capacity building; and whether pharmacy can receive ‘special’ attention in terms of funding, because of it being a health discipline.