Universidade Pedagogica

HERE IS an institution that focused, to begin with, exclusively on the training of schoolteachers. It originally developed inside the Faculty of Education at Eduardo Mondlane University, finally emerging as an independent university – the Pedagogic Higher Institute – in 1986. One effect of the liberalising of Mozambique’s socialist regime in 1990 was an increase in the demand for higher education – and the process also opened the door to private education. The result was a situation that favoured people living and working in the cities who were able to afford private education. The response of University of Pedagogica was to steadily expand, especially in the rural areas, and academically to diversify away from teacher training alone. Today, the university offers degree courses in science, engineering and technology, as well as usiness and law, but the main focus remains on teacher training and the educational sciences.

With more than 30 000 students on its books in 2007, University of Pedagogica is Mozambique’s largest higher education institution; and with satellite campuses in Beira, Nampula, Quelimane, Gaza and Niassa, it provides regional accessibility to higher education for Mozambique’s millions of rural and village dwellers, many of whom are severely marginalised. This approach draws the university into the country’s regional development programmes, which include definite attempts to stem the process of urbanisation and the allied ‘brain drain’ process that shifts the educated elite away from the disadvantaged regions and into the cities.

At the moment, teaching is seen to be the overwhelming institutional focus, with only 2,5 percent of the total devoted to research. This situation is changing. So seriously does University of Pedagogica (which is 99 percent statesubsidised) take the potential for research that five new centres are in the process of being created to facilitate research activity in all the academic areas in which the university is currently active.