Chinhoyi University of Technology

THIS UNIVERSITY is one of several that have come into being in the last two decades as a direct result of Zimbabwe’s deliberate policy of higher education expansion and devolution. The town of Chinhoyi is situated approximately 120 km along the main road to Lake Kariba and the Zambian border; and the Chinhoyi University of Technology has grown out of the Chinhoyi Technical Teachers’ College that was founded in 1991. The first-degree programmes were offered in 1999 under the control of the University of Zimbabwe. Soon afterwards, in 2001, the institution gained full university status.

Today, the university provides undergraduate courses in the fields of agriculture, engineering, and business sciences. Technical teacher education and creative art and design are offered through the university’s single institute, the Institute of Lifelong Learning. With nearly 3 000 students and an academic staff of 163, the university describes itself as ‘a small but highly selective institution’.

But there are serious problems in the current economic climate that relate to quality and, indeed, to sheer survival. For example, it has been reported 99 that the entire student body shares only three computers. In the same report, mention is made of ‘a massive (commercial) agricultural
project in conjunction with the Zimbabwean National Army’, that the university has been obliged to embark upon, using its own experimental farm.

In spite of these difficulties, the Chinhoyi University of Technology soldiers on. A Strategic Management postgraduate masters programme was introduced in 2005, and ‘continues to flourish’, a claim that warrants respect when the records show that 62 masters degrees were conferred in 2008, alongside the nearly 700 undergraduate degrees. In addition, a new school is being planned, the School of Hospitality and Tourism, which as part of its academic programme will run a hotel existing on the experimental farm as a commercial venture.