By Mubatsi Asinja Habati
Makerere University’s Web ranking of the top 100 universities in Africa has improved. According to the latest (July) Webometric’s ranking, Makerere holds the 20th position from the 32nd position it held in the previous ranking in January this year. The site puts the university in the 3,811th position among the top 6000 universities in the world.
The news has caused excitement at Uganda’s oldest university with observers arguing that the Makerere seems to be the track to revamp its past glory.
The Webometric ranking basically considers the university’s presence on the web by examining the number of hits and research published online. The ranking criterion involves not only formal communication such as e-journals, and repositories but also informal scholarly communication.
Interestingly, Makerere University Faculty of Computing and Information Technology was ranked 56 ahead of Kampala International University which is ranked 58th among the top 100 African universities. Michael Niyitegeka, head of corporate relations office of the CIT faculty at Makerere says they are happy with the ranking considering that their faculty website was competing with fully fledged universities on the continent and hopes for improvement.
The first seven universities in the ranking are from South Africa. Kenyatta University of Kenya was ranked 100th. Of the 100 universities, only two are from Uganda. South Africa has 20 universities in the best 100 African Universities. In East Africa Makerere comes after Strathmore University Nairobi.
Makerere University has maintained a constant plea for more funding from the central government but in vain. The university administration argues that with increased funding they can run the intuition better and probably post a much better ranking in future.
South Africa’s University of Cape Town tops the list of the top 100 African universities.
great. they should do more than that.
ReplyDelete