How Higher Education in the UK can help Sri Lanka

Earlier this year former Vice Principal David Swinfen spent twelve days in Sri Lanka at the invitation of the British Council. David was invited to carry out a review of Higher Education in the country, to establish how HE Institutions and the HE sector generally had been affected by the tsunami, and to make suggestions as to how HE in the United Kingdom might do its bit to help. Here he shares some of his experiences from the trip.

Although far from the source of the devastation, Sri Lanka was very badly hit by the Asian Tsunami. It didn’t need my presence to work out the extent of the impact on the universities - 8 staff members lost, around 100 students dead or missing, and about 72 million rupees worth of physical damage to plant and equipment. In terms of damage to buildings, only the universities on the eastern coast - Jaffna, Eastern, and South Eastern - suffered to any significant extent.

But it is not enough to measure the impact on the universities simply in terms of rebuild costs, important as those are. They suffered a good deal in terms of morale - although the best placed technically to anticipate the tsunami, they had failed to do so and this failure is deeply felt by staff in all the institutions. Perhaps for this reason, they are even more determined to play their part in the rebuilding of the country. The universities were quick to respond to the emergency when it happened, setting up centres for relief and reconstruction almost immediately after the event.

How can we help? Individual universities in the UK could, as some are doing already, offer scholarships, fee waivers, or other forms of financial support to junior staff in Sri Lankan universities to enable them to upgrade their qualifications. Universities could arrange for appropriate staff to spend some time on secondment in a Sri Lankan university to help with curriculum design, teaching, and training in research methods. Collaborative research programmes, of which several already exist, could be designed to mutual benefit, especially if they were designed to tackle some of the country’s urgent economic and social problems.

It is true that there is a financial side to all this, and someone will have to find the money to support these proposals. HEFCE and SHEFC are being made aware of the conclusions of my report. But the cost need not be huge, or beyond the ability of any of our own universities to bear. More important is the will. If we really want to help our colleagues in Sri Lanka to help themselves, then let’s get on with it.

To view David's full report, log on to the British Council website at www.britishcouncil.org and search for 'Swinfen'.

Even more important for the long term future of the country, they see themselves at the centre of planning for developing their regional and national economies. The universities we visited were bursting with ideas for economic diversification, for new enterprises to supplement the traditional activities of fishing and agriculture. Seaweed farming, the breeding of ornamental fish, research into new strains of crops to overcome the effects of excess salinity, new degree programmes in tourism and hospitality management - these were just a few of the ideas advanced during the tour.

There is a problem, however. One thing above all was borne in on me as I went from university to university, and that was that the difficulties faced by them in their quest to meet the development needs of their surrounding regions were to only a limited extent born of the tsunami - rather they were of very long standing. Observers of the Sri Lankan higher education sector told me about this before I ever set foot in the island. Typically the universities are in serious and chronic need of resources - better qualified staff, equipment, even books, and if this is true of all of them, the situation is even more urgent in the universities on the eastern coast.