An Assessment of the Implications of Research Policies on Research Performance in African tertiary institutions

Abstract

This paper focuses on the assessment of the implications of research policies on the
performance of research at the institutions of higher learning in Africa. There are numerous
challenges the institutions face and these among others include limited supply of high quality
evaluation evidence, which is seen as the market failure for both education outcomes and the
institutional research. The public seems to have limited information about performance in
universities and educators face limited incentives to improve performance. In the market for
institutional research, consumers face information problems, which in turn make it difficult to
determine the quality of research product due to work overloads on the part of the lecturers
and students. The success of institutional research policies are therefore based on requiring
better data in the institutions under study to ascertain the workloads and to limit
management interferences in research.