Improving the Mode of Academic Networking to Scale Up Land Education in Africa

Typical problems faced by people in Africa today include the lack of access to land, land tenure insecurity, ineffective land administrations systems, inefficient land governance and the lack of approaches that are locally adaptable to solving the local problems in the continent (among many other land-related challenges). Academic institutions in African that offer educational programmes in land administration and land management play critical roles in training and research in the continent. However, most of them lack opportunities to learn from best practices around the world and often work in isolation from each other. Effective building and exchange of land-related knowledge among scholars are crucial for Africa. It provides the opportunity for the scholars to do more collaborative research and innovate ways to convert their research results into practical products that has policy relevance as well as socioeconomic and environmental values. Considering the need to scale up knowledge and capacity for the efficient
use and management of land and natural resources in Africa, this paper explores a new mode of academic networking that is capable of scaling up land education in Africa.
The paper analyses some of the existing networks in order to improve mode for scaling up land education land related research in Africa. It looks to identify areas for improvements in academia to include academic activism, youth mentoring, women empowerment, and investment in land by the networks. The paper also calls for making the networks active, efficient, and responsive to the land education needs of the continent. Finally, the paper calls for a borderless Africa that would allow for free-flow of networking activities between Africans; and remove the immigration walls that are holding back African academics from
freely interacting with each other.