Ethiopia: Gambella Post-Secondary Education Graduates on the rises

Gambella, July 18, 2015 (GMN) - The world we live in is a vast, wondrous, and intricate system. Every part of it is connected to, and dependent upon all the other parts. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he/she learned in school.” (Albert Einstein).

Universities play a critical role in society, making substantial intellectual, social, cultural and economic contributions. Both the personal and the societal benefits of higher levels of education are well documented, and countries around the world are now investing in post-secondary education and research as a way of building social and economic prosperity. It is widely recognized that university research yields answers to some of the immediate questions our society faces, while history tells us that great innovations emerge from basic research, often of an interdisciplinary nature. Society also benefits from a citizenry educated in the broad array of disciplines represented by the liberal arts and sciences. Building our society of the 21st century and finding solutions to its problems will require concerted efforts across all disciplines. Recently, we have seen the rising of Gambella post secondary education graduates in Ethiopian universities. This year alone more Gambalians students were graduated in Gonder, Addis Ababa, Awasha and Gambella Post-Secondary Education than the past five years. That is very good news for Gambella region to be proud of it.

The growing importance of post-secondary education in Gambella society has resulted in a number of developments that will require attention.

To achieve our vision and mission as a university, we must focus on four key areas and goals:

• People Goal: to recruit and retain a diverse group of exceptionally talented students, faculty and staff and to support them in ways that allows them to achieve their highest potential.
• Quality Goal: to offer programs in teaching, research and support of such quality as to place us in the upper 20 per cent of a national set of comparable programs as judged by peer evaluation.
• Community Goal: to establish University of Gambella as a recognized cornerstone of our community, committed to the sustainable social, cultural and economic development of our region and our nation.
• Resources Goal: to generate the resources necessary from both public and private sources to allow us to achieve our objectives and to steward those resources in a sustainable fashion. These goals are interdependent, and most initiatives of strategic importance transcend several or all of these areas.

To achieve these strategic goals requires establishing a series of objectives and the strategies needed to accomplish them. The following sections of the plan outline these objectives and strategies. Given the diversity of activity at our university, they range in focus from the strategic to the operational. Each strategy identified indicates the office(s) with primary responsibility for implementation. More importantly, the success of this plan, as with the earlier version, will be dependent upon academic and support units responding to these goals and objectives within their unit-level planning. These unit-level plans are then incorporated into our ongoing budget and staffing plans as part of the annual integrated planning process led by the Provost.

Source: gambellamedia.com