Browsing by Subject "Somalia"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Academic staff views of higher education quality in Somaliland
    (2014-11) Jones, Thomas J.
    Academic quality in `peripheral' universities in sub-Saharan Africa is a critical issue for international higher education development. The purpose of this study is to determine academic views of institutional quality in the Republic of Somaliland, to understand the purpose and framework for measuring quality in their system. Significant enrollment growth, new institutional formation, private higher education expansion, and very limited public resources define a region like Somaliland. Though growing equity of access for students is suggested, system growth in a context of limited resources raises significant questions regarding institutional quality and academic intensification. A congruent, mixed-method of surveys (N = 166) and interviews (37) are used to determine academic viewpoints at three sample institutions: University of Hargeisa, Amoud University, and Admas University College. From these data, academic staff in Somaliland mostly define institutional quality according to the foundational purposes of maintaining civil peace through youth engagement and economic development through human capital training. Academic staff agreed that the overall qualification and training of lecturers was a limiting factor for higher education quality. Due to human resource flight during the civil war of the late 1980s-90s and significant growth of the higher education sector, lecturers are under qualified compared to international and regional standards; only 4% hold a doctoral qualification. Consistent with this result, academic staff view the number of professors with doctoral degrees as the most important indicator of quality in higher education. Though, as is shown in qualitative interviews, phenomena related to students (post-graduate employment, enrollment, and performance on international exams) are also important indicators of institutional success.
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    Improving the Agronomics and Economics of Cereal Production in Somalia’s Lower Shebelle Riverine Region
    (2018-02) Gavin, Ryan
    While agriculture remains Somalia’s main economic driver, hunger abounds. In this thesis, the dynamics of Somali food security are explored through historic trends in domestic cereal production, imports, aid, and population. The results of on-farm maize trials, which compared an improved maize cropping system with a traditional farming system employed in the Lower Shebelle region, are also discussed. In these trials, improved system maize yields were 70% greater in the 2014 Gu season and 124% greater in the 2014/15 Deyr season than the traditional system. In the 2014/15 Deyr season, the improved system was also 142% more profitable. When Sesame production in the region was investigated, variety proved to be the primary yield determinate during the 2016 Hagai and 2016/17 Deyr season, with the Local variety performing especially well. Together, these trials are among the first agricultural investigations to take place in Somalia in over a quarter century.
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    Rethinking the Somali State
    (2017-05) Obsiye, Aman