The University of Nairobi has maintained its position as Kenya’s top institution of higher learning according to the latest list of top 100 universities in Africa issued by EduRank.
However, Makerere University of Uganda at position seven (7) has beaten UON (position 8) to become the leading university in the East African region. The top 100 universities in Africa are ranked by EduRank based on research outputs, non-academic prominence, and alumni influence, EduRank said in a statement.
Locally, UON is followed by Kenyatta University (38), JKUAT (53), Strathmore University (68), Moi University (73), Mount Kenya University (81) and Egerton University (83). Strathmore and MKU are the only private institutions from East Africa that are ranked among the 100 100 colleges from the continent.
Other colleges listed from this region are Addis Ababa University of Ethiopia (19) and Tanzania’s University of Dar es Salaam (25), Sokoine University (49) and Muhimbili University. From Uganda, Mbarara University is ranked 95th, becoming the 13th institution to be listed from Eastern Africa.
“The rankings are determined by analyzing 24.5 million citations received by 2.16 million academic publications made by 1,104 universities from Africa, the popularity of 3,700 recognized alumni, and the largest reference database available,” EduRank says in a statement.
The top 10 universities in Africa were the University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Stellenbosch, University of Pretoria, Cairo University, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Makerere University, University of Nairobi, University of Johannesburg and University of South Africa.
Over the years, the University of Nairobi has been ranked among the top universities in Africa and the world. UoN was previously ranked ahead of its fierce competitor Makerere University in a survey by Webometrics which analyses all institutions of higher learning in the world.
Webometrics ranks universities based on impact, openness and excellence parameters in its ranking. Makerere University and UoN frequently trade positions one and two in the Eastern Africa region in surveys conducted by different entities
EduRank.org is an independent metric-based ranking of 14,131 universities from 183 countries. It utilize the world’s largest scholarly papers database with 98,302,198 scientific publications and 2,149,512,106 citations to rank universities across 246 research topics.
The researcher conducts a series of statistical analyses to generate comparative university rankings in various fields, by country, region, and globally. “In the overall rankings, we add non-academic prominence and alumni popularity indicators,” says EduRank, but advises interested parties to always check official university websites for the latest enrollment information.
