By Dr Shame Mugova
Zimbabwe has become remarkably good at creating universities. What is much harder to create is what makes a university intellectually serious.
A university can be established by legislation. Land can be allocated, buildings constructed, a governing council appointed and a vice chancellor recruited. Programmes can be advertised and students admitted. But an experienced doctoral supervisor, a serious research laboratory, a successful grant team or a respected school of scholarship cannot be created quite so quickly.
A country can create a university by legislation. It cannot create a professor by legislation.
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That distinction deserves more attention as Zimbabwe continues expanding its higher education landscape. According to the Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education, Zimbabwe had 20 registered degree awarding institutions as of June 2024, comprising 13 state universities and seven private institutions.
The expansion was deliberate and, in many respects, justified. Government pursued greater geographic access, including a state university presence across the provinces. Zimbabwe had inherited a highly concentrated system, while more school leavers and regions outside the major cities needed access.
This is not an argument against expanding higher education. Zimbabwe arguably still needs considerably more tertiary participation. UNESCO data put gross tertiary enrolment at only about 8 percent in 2024. The harder question is whether expanding access must always mean creating another autonomous university.
Zimbabwe may need much more higher education without necessarily needing many more universities.
Access can also expand through regional campuses, university colleges, polytechnics, technical colleges, distance education and specialist institutes. Zimbabwe has used such models before. Gwanda State University, for example, initially operated as a university college under NUST.
Why must institutional independence come first? Access and independence are not the same thing. Programmes can extend into another province without immediately recreating a full university administration.
The deeper issue appears when we stop counting university names and start counting academic capital.
Consider the National University of Science and Technology. Its 2024 Annual Report recorded 624 teaching staff against an establishment of 792, leaving 168 teaching posts vacant. Among them were 23 full professors, 21 associate professors and 74 senior lecturers. The university reported 168 doctorate holders.
These are not figures from a newly established institution. NUST has existed for more than three decades. The same report shows how difficult retention can be. Twenty four academic staff resigned during 2024, including 12 lecturers with PhDs, three senior lecturers and one associate professor. NUST itself identified low salaries as a difficulty in attracting and retaining critical staff.
This is where pay and brain drain become central. Zimbabwean academics with transferable doctorates can seek opportunities across the region and beyond.
Low remuneration produces two forms of academic loss. One is obvious, the academic leaves Zimbabwe. The other is quieter, the lecturer stays but must teach elsewhere or take additional work to survive, reducing time for research, supervision and grant applications.
You cannot build a knowledge economy while making the people who produce knowledge constantly calculate whether they can afford to remain in it.
If established universities are already trying to fill vacancies and retain doctorate holders, where will additional universities recruit their professors, doctoral supervisors and research leaders?
New capacity will be created through new doctorates, returning academics and staff development. Great Zimbabwe University shows that younger institutions can deepen their academic base over time. But maturation takes years, while the same professor can also teach at several universities and the same doctoral supervisor can serve several institutions.
A scholar’s name can appear in several university systems while the country still possesses only one scholar.
Multiplying universities does not automatically multiply academics. Sometimes it simply multiplies the institutions competing for the same academics.
Not every university needs to become a globally ranked research institution. Regional universities can transform communities through teaching and applied work, while international rankings have real limitations.
Still, only a small group of Zimbabwean universities has substantial visibility in major international research indicators. QS and SCImago each capture only a handful of Zimbabwean institutions.
The exact positions matter less than what happens when the lens changes. When we count institutions, Zimbabwe has a sizeable university system. When we look for internationally visible research depth, that system becomes much smaller.
Zimbabwe has built a university map faster than it has built a research system.
Nature Index provides an even narrower filter. Zimbabwe’s output is modest and heavily concentrated in health sciences, although Zimbabwean researchers have contributed to major international journals. That concentration matters because it shows that serious research strength often sits within a few established disciplines and networks rather than being evenly distributed across institutions.
Zimbabwe can therefore produce internationally competitive scholarship. But such work grows from ecosystems of scholars, laboratories, doctoral researchers, collaborators and grant networks built over many years.
Research excellence does not appear because an institution acquires the word university. It accumulates.
Competitive funding tells the same story. NUST reported about US$1.65 million in external research funding in 2024. Winning such funding requires researchers, ethics systems, grant administration, laboratories and international networks.
Publication numbers also require caution. One paper in a reputable specialist journal and another in a questionable outlet should not carry the same intellectual weight merely because each counts as one publication.
Local and regional scholarship still matters. The point is simply that quality must matter alongside quantity.
A university system can become very productive on paper while producing remarkably little knowledge that travels beyond the paper.
Specialisation matters too. NUST emphasised science and technology, while Gwanda State University was conceived around fields linked to Matabeleland South. Such differentiation helps concentrate scarce expertise and expensive infrastructure.
The concern arises when specialised universities gradually become similar institutions competing for the same students and academics.
A specialised university adds national capacity when it does something the existing system cannot already do well.
Religious universities raise the same question. Zimbabwe already has several faith based universities, with projects such as Great Heights and Gazaland also emerging.
Churches have made enormous contributions to education, and private funding is not the same as state funding. But professors, supervisors, research collaborators, students and donor networks still operate within finite markets.
The question is whether every educational ambition requires an independent university. Could some objectives be achieved through a specialist institute, university college, campus or partnership? Government should face the same test.
The real test of a new university is not whether it can enrol students. It is whether it creates capabilities the country did not already possess.
Every university also creates continuing requirements for laboratories, libraries, accommodation and research facilities while established institutions are still modernising their own.
A country cannot wait until every existing building is perfect before beginning anything new. The issue is whether it repeatedly creates new permanent obligations without sufficiently deepening institutions already established.
Institutional multiplication is not the same thing as institutional development.
Zimbabwe may therefore need clearer differentiation. A strong technical college is not a failed university, and a serious polytechnic is not simply waiting to be upgraded.
University status carries prestige, but prestige should not determine national skills policy.
A strong technical college can contribute more to industrialisation than a weak university offering another collection of familiar degrees.
Before another university is established, harder questions should be asked. What capability will it add? Where will its professors come from? What will retain them? Who will supervise its doctoral candidates? Could an existing institution achieve the same objective through a campus, college, institute or partnership?
These questions are not hostile to expansion. They are what serious expansion should require.
A new university can be announced in an afternoon. But a serious professor may represent twenty or thirty years of education, research, publication, supervision and accumulated expertise.
A new university can be announced in an afternoon. A serious academic culture can take a generation to build.
Zimbabwe has expanded the university map. The harder challenge is deepening what sits behind those names while retaining the people who give them intellectual substance.
Zimbabwe may need many more doctors, engineers, scientists, technicians, teachers and researchers. But more higher education and more universities are not necessarily the same development strategy.
A country does not strengthen higher education merely by multiplying the institutions that consume professors. It must also multiply the conditions that produce, attract and retain professors.
Before Zimbabwe asks where the next university should be built, perhaps it should first ask a harder question.
What are the universities already standing still waiting to become?
Dr Shame Mugova is a Lecturer in Finance at Birmingham City University. He writes on finance, economic policy, governance and development, with a particular interest in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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