competition on an Africa-wide basis, and consider associating the AAU with the work.

The British Council's sponsorship of small-scale, high level-workshops for African vice-chancellors and a few consultants deserves support, and (as suggested earlier) extension to university registrars, planning officers and finance officers. Cofinancing should be considered if necessary. The experience of the Nigerian networks of vice-chancellors and senior academic officers should be supported and, if they are willing, tapped into in a suitable way for the benefit of other sub-regions.

The achievement of a general maintenance culture and preventive maintenance system is essentially a matter for local university management and financial allocation, but experience indicates an important role for technical assistance and training in this area, and visits to campuses which have successful systems in operation. It is worth consideration whether the donors which have the advantage of experience in helping to develop maintenance systems, like the Swiss and the Nordic agencies, could make this available to the regional university associations and other interested donors for possible application elsewhere.

The AAU's initial work on universities and `the productive sector' deserves to be disseminated more widely and possibly extended. Individual universities which require assistance in designing and managing the establishment of development offices, should be able to call on suitable consultancy support or study visits both in Africa and abroad. The University of Lagos has perhaps one of the best developed organizations of this type in Africa (and also a consultancy company of long standing). The existence of a large number of specialized universities of science and technology, agriculture, and business, suggests that a workshop be sponsored, if the idea has their support, to share their experience of their relations with industry across the board.

The UNDP/Dutch government/World Bank project on consultancy development in Africa deserves to be consolidated and extended, subject, that is, to the outcome of the evaluation. At any event, ESAMI's and GIMPA's exceptional experience in this field needs to be made available to universities which seek advice on how to deal with consultancy work on their campuses, including setting up consultancy companies. There is scope for establishing collaborative links between consultancy companies in African universities and similar companies or centers in universities elsewhere in Africa or abroad. As the Ghanaian project director suggested, such collaboration could benefit the universities directly, for instance through investigations of postgraduate capacity and curriculum development, or a project to determine how to encourage people who have made their mark in industry to return to the universities as teachers.