Driven by its stated mission to pursue internationalisation via a socially progressive path, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (Alba) is quietly expanding its alternative vision of higher education across Latin America. The left-leaning alliance, which includes Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela, is the brainchild of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, and Fidel Castro, former president of Cuba.
It was set up in 2004 as a response to US-led plans to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas. The aim was to counter what the two socialist leaders saw as the US desire to keep Latin America and the Caribbean in a state of economic and cultural subservience. Their plan was to implement a modern version of the grand union of Latin America nations envisaged by Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century political and military leader seen by many as the region’s “liberator” from colonial rule.
Not surprisingly, the movement has its opponents, and within higher education, moves for reform in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela have provoked violent street demonstrations and fierce opposition from the traditional university sector. Speaking after the world’s first scholarly conference on the Alba alliance held earlier this year at London Metropolitan University, academic Dr. Thomas Muhr said the Alba’s approach represents “a fundamental rejection of the internationalisation and commoditisation of higher education currently under way in Europe and the US”.
A visiting fellow in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol and an expert on the Alba alliance, Muhr says numbers of international students enroled at universities in Cuba and Venezuela are rising. Now in the tens of thousands, these foreign students hail from some of the poorest areas of the Alba member states, as well as from elsewhere in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The majority undertake professional medical training with the intention of returning to work in their home communities. However, a growing number are studying in fields such as education, oil geopolitics, tourism and agriculture.
This expansion of access to university places is one of the key objectives of the Grandnational Project Alba-Education, part of the alliance’s wider programme to promote a regional alternative to the market-driven globalisation model. These ongoing programmes, which subsequently have been adopted by other developing countries, are intended to address deep structural inequalities in the region and “pave the way for more people to enter higher education”, says Muhr.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)