“As Director-General of the Higher Education Authority, my role is to bring a new consciousness, to help decolonise our system of higher education, to bend it away from its shameful colonial past,” Professor Chinsembu said, adding, “My job is to make our universities assume a new and practical meaning in the everyday life of an ordinary Zambian. We want our higher education to breathe new self-confidence into ourselves, to liberate us from the shackles of poverty and the problems of want.”

The Director-General emphasised that HEA was focussed on building a new canon of higher education, one which is translational and practical.

“Higher education must have a tangible meaning,” Professor Chinsembu stated, adding, “Our post-independence call is that university students should produce solar panels, university students should produce vaccines, and university students must develop new drugs from our indigenous medicinal flora.”

The Director-General said this when he gave the welcome speech during the opening ceremony of the 27^th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2024) which was held at Avani Hotel in Livingstone.

Professor Chinsembu stated that ETD 2024 was a provocation towards digital citizenship.

“This conference should remind all of us about the need to correctly verify sources of information,” he said, adding, “University students should be taught how to distinguish empirical knowledge from fake or altered content distributed by untrustworthy sources.”

He added that although institutional repositories provide a platform for storing intellectual outputs, many academic staff and students in Zambia fail to access electronic theses and dissertations due to lack of desktop computers and laptops.

“Our dream is that every university student in Zambia must have a laptop,” the Director-General stated, adding, “Universities should enable students to own the digital space.”

Professor Chinsembu lamented that in many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), the lack of access to electronic theses and dissertations is further hampered by the lack of internet connectivity, irregular power supply by ZESCO, and lack of skilled person-power in the field of digital libraries and electronic archives.

EDT 2024 was held from 4^th to 6^th November, 2024.

Read the full speech here: https://hea.org.zm/speeches/#

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