African universities fare badly

TSHIRELETSO MOTLOGELWA
Staff Writer | Wednesday December 5, 2007 00:00

 

Even renowned African universities such as Makerere in Uganda, Stellenbosch (South Africa) and Cairo (Egypt) failed to make the top 150 of the world's best. The top African university is the University of Cape Town (UCT) at position 200, followed by University of the Witwatersrand also of South Africa at 282. The University of Botswana is not even listed among the top 400. Only the two South African institutions from the African continent are in the top 500.

The list is dominated by American and British institutions with Harvard (US) in position one, followed by University of Oxford (UK), University of Cambridge (UK), Yale University (US), Imperial College London (UK), Princeton University (US) and the California Institute of Technology (US).

Australian and Asian universities also did well in the report.

The annual report measures universities' performance alongside others by comparing, among other things, the amount of citation counts related to the university, that is the number of times research/papers are cited by other researchers, the way other institutions review the university, and how staff and students within the university view it.