Internationalisation in Higher Education: Challenges for Research Collaboration for Academics in Developing Countries (Zimbabwe)

Recently, the academic profession has come under great pressure to transform in the way it does in business moving from the predominantly collegial to a managerialist model (Kogan and Teichler, 2007). With the advent of managerialism, universities have grown into large bureaucratic structures with professional managers (Kogan and Teichler, 2007).These changes tend to affect academics in certain ways, for example through growing internationalization, change in management style and the aspect of relevance (Kogan and Teichler, 2007).With relevance came a rise of industry oriented research (Altbach, 2005). In the views of Altbach (2005) government, business, industry and labour came to play an important part in academic governance. University researchers are to join forces with researchers or practitioners in industry and business who are the providers of research funds (Altbach, 2005). The academic profession in developing countries faces the most difficult of challenges in order to maintain a viable academic culture under worsening conditions of service and fewer established norms (Altbach, 2005). Increasing internationalization may come in as an advantage in terms of information exchange at a global level as well as the rich diversity of students and ideas. However in developing countries like Zimbabwe where, access to information communication technology is still a privilege of the few, a majority of lecturers both female and male struggle to get access to information exchange and global networking. This paper explores the challenges experienced by academics in Zimbabwe with respect to partnership formation and international research collaborations. It adopts a qualitative methodology where focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with purposively sampled lecturers from three state universities in Zimbabwe. Some of the major findings were that collaborative research was hindered by funding; at times partners who bring in funds want to control the research proceedings, political challenges, language and cultural differences, poorly developed ICT infrastructure. Positives accruing from collaboration include creating of research networks, intellectual growth, access to funds and resources and sharing of skills. Recommendations include early face to face meetings of collaborating partners, the creation of research funds by the state to support academic’ research efforts, academics taking advantage of conferences held in own countries to network and institutions creating enabling environments for collaborative research.