After decades of decline, African higher education is now arguably in a new era of revival. With the prevalence of knowledge economy discourse, national governments in Africa and their development partners have increasingly aligned higher education with poverty reduction plans and strategies. Research capacity has become a critical development…

Under the influence of the external policy pressure of donors such as the World Bank, higher education in Ethiopia has witnessed a series of institutional and system-wide reforms. This article reviews selected policy documents to show key neo-liberal policy agendas endorsed in the reforms and explicate how they have affected social equity in the…