The 2020 ranking of the 200 best African universities has just been made public by UniRank, the main directory and search engine for international higher education. And no Ivorian university, out of the six, is one of them, despite the efforts made over the past decade by the authorities and development partners to make them competitive.
South Africa takes the first six places with the universities of Pretoria, Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal and Stellenbosch. The Rainbow Nation is followed by Kenya which records, in seventh place, the University of Nairobi.
The University of Lagos, the first in West Africa comes from Nigeria and is ranked eighth. While the Cheick Anta Diop University of Dakar in Senegal, the first university in French-speaking Africa, is in 59th place.
The 2020 ranking of the 200 best African universities is obtained from several criteria, in particular providing courses mainly in a traditional teaching format, face to face and not at a distance and above all offering quality scientific productions, published in journals and international scientific journals.
The Ivorian universities seem to have sinned on this last point. Hence the initiative of the Strategic Support Program for Scientific Research, PASRES, to improve the capacities of 24 young research professors, from six universities, in terms of writing scientific articles.
“This situation concerns us all. The Ivorian State devotes a lot of effort to higher education and scientific research. We have high quality academics and researchers. It is therefore inadmissible and inconceivable that our country is not among the best nations in the field of science, technology and innovation in Africa,” laments Dr Sangaré Yaya, Executive Director of PASRES.

And to specify “that researchers need support in terms of infrastructure and access to scientific information throughout the world. And they also need funding because research is expensive. This is why we commend the government for having set up the Science, Technology and Innovation Fund, FONSTI, which will strengthen the operational capacities of PASRES and its fields of activity for the benefit of science and research in Côte d'Ivoire".
Writing a research or a scientific article is one of the main challenges faced by researchers and universities in different disciplines. It requires skills such as novelty, accuracy, objectivity, finesse of style and the ability to interact with scientific and global levels of debate.