I visited Debub University this afternoon for a tour round the physics department. Debub means “south” in Amharic, and Debub Uni is a government institution that takes approx 1500 students from all over the country. After a chat with the Dean of Natural Sciences I was taken around by the Head of the Physics Dept and one of the senior lecturers, a retired physics professor from India. Some of the buildings are new and would look modern in the UK. The rest of my experience revealed a system that’s anything but modern. In fact, a better description would be of dedicated staff heroically struggling in a barely-functioning system with severe lack of resources and funding. The interior of the buildings is shabby, there is nothing on display on any of the wall spaces or in the corridors. The physics equipment store, for a Physics BSc programme of up to 40 students in each of the three years of the degree programme, was woefully lacking compared to a Physics Dept in a UK university. If the dept want to buy equipment, the order must go through the Ministry of Education (MoE) in Addis, which then goes through an international tendering process. The uni is not allowed to try and procure equipment directly from anyone. As a result it often takes months and can take YEARS to get simple pieces of standard, widely available equipment. There is no transparency and once the MoE bureaucrats receive the order it sometimes “disappears”. The teaching lab was quite nice but limited in equipment and with only a chalk board for lecturers to use. There are no PCs for students to use apart from two for use during their final year projects. The Natural Sciences library was reasonably well stocked with books, but the range is limited. An increasing number of books are photocopied, the university, like a lot of Ethiopian institutions, ignores copyright and quite right too. No research is conducted. All students live on campus in dormitories. No student study bedrooms here with en suite bathrooms! There are eight students to a room. There are none of the societies, clubs, bars, leisure facilities, etc you would find at a UK uni. In the evenings students are busy studying.

All Ethiopians understand that the only chance they have of living a reasonable life is through being highly educated. Even then, their choices are very limited. Most physics graduates end up as school teachers because there are no jobs for their skills. I keep being reminded that the majority of people here do not have choices of what they do with their lives. Most people in teaching are not there through choice. My life in the UK is a life full of choices and opportunities. Most of the time, I’m either not aware of the choices I have available or I take them all for granted. Today I feel angry. There are so many problems here. Government inefficiency is just one of many.