Makerere University is amongst the top five universities in Africa, according to The Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
As the only institution in the top 5 that is located outside South Africa, Makerere is the highest ranking university in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The news is welcome positive PR for the university following the much publicized administrative incident last week involving the Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research and one of the research fellows.
The University of Cape Town continues their stronghold as the premier university in Africa. The university is reputable for its “highly-cited research, strong international outlook and an ability to attract large sums of money from industry”.
See Also: Should Makerere Seek Alternative Sources of Funding? Part I
The University of Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal are the other occupants of the top 5 places.
South Africa provides six of the top 15 universities, with the University of Pretoria and University of South Africa ranked sixth and thirteenth respectively.
Egypt has three universities on the list, as Suez Canal University is the highest ranked at ninth. Alexandria University and Cairo University – established in 1908 – are ranked tenth and eleventh respectively.
The University of Nairobi is the only other East African university in the top 10 at number 8. Nairobi formed part of the University of East Africa alongside Makerere and University of Dar-es-Salaam until 1970.
About Times Higher Education
The Times Higher Education is a London-based weekly magazine reporting on news and issues surrounding higher education.
Since 2004, they’ve published a ranking of the best universities in the world, titled The Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
To create the rankings, the team drew data from 1,2000 universities from 88 countries, and employed a global Academic Reputation Survey of 10,500 leading scholars from around the world, who provided their expert views on the world’s leading universities – and an additional 400,000 data points on institutions’ academic reputation by country and by subject.
In addition, the team also analysed 51 million citations to 11.3 million academic journal articles (from Elsevier’s Scopus database) published over a five-year period between 2010 and 2014.