Absorptive capacity

The introspection requires not hyperbole but an honest assessment of our capabilities


Muhammad Hamid Zaman October 30, 2018
The writer is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of biomedical engineering, international health and medicine at Boston University. He tweets @mhzaman

From Riyadh to Beijing, and with Islamabad in between, the conversation in the power circles is about finances, loans and economy. This is rightfully so as the challenges facing us are both acute and urgent, and while the terms of various loans are being discussed (or not!) — there is agreement that these are, at best, short-term band-aids. While loans are the talk of the town, there is a bigger, and perhaps an uncomfortable, question looming. And that is, if we ever graduate from loans, and attract foreign funding, in the form of aid or investment, do we really have what it takes to deliver? So, if there was a Marshall plan for Pakistan, similar to the reconstruction of Western Europe post-World War II, will we be able to change our destiny? The introspection requires not hyperbole but an honest assessment of our capabilities.

One way to look at this question — which is not only something that investors and aid agencies will look at — but one that we should also ask us regularly, is to evaluate our absorptive capacity. What I mean by absorptive capacity is the ability of our system to absorb the external support, and convert it into meaningful outcomes that are sustainable and provide value well beyond the initial investment.

To further explore the concept, and our status of absorptive capacity I will focus on the higher education sector in this article.

Let us evaluate a hypothetical example. Assume that a university gets a big grant of the order of tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars today. Will they be able to create something tangible out of that investment? Will the universities be able to produce a meaningful outcome in some finite time that will give real returns? Or will the funding be lost on crisis management, hiring of weak personnel, a new building that is a white elephant and shiny new cars?

Absorptive capacity is more than mere rankings. While it is fancy these days to strategise exclusively to satisfy the criteria of the newspapers or private companies by creating these elaborate ranking schemes, the rankings provide little information on the capacity of the university to create sustainable and meaningful change in society.

Based on the current data about quality (not quantity) of original publications, the ability of our graduates to solve complex socio-economic problems or make original discoveries, or direct linkages of universities with economically-sustainable sectors, the reality is that by and large our universities do not have the absorptive capacity. There are very few (but notable) exceptions in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi, but in general the higher education sector, partly due to institutional governance and partly due to lack of a clear vision, does not have the capacity to create good returns on investment.

This does not mean that our institutions cannot achieve this. This just means that if large funds were to appear magically today, most of our institutions would not be able to put them to best use. To create absorptive capacity, three things are needed. First is better governance. This means leadership with a vision, emphasis on quality and a secure environment for research. Second, alignment with existing national (and historic) strengths in research. Third, autonomy and empowerment of universities to set their own vision that is organic and not set up by bureaucrats or politicians. There is ample data to show that higher education is a worthy investment for national development. What that data doesn’t show is that for it to happen, the institutions must be able to perform independently, rigorously, ethically and with a sense of national purpose. The bad news is that we are not quite there yet, the good news is that getting there is entirely possible.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 30th, 2018.

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