Kenyan Higher Education minister William Ruto’s ultimatum to public universities that they phase off all courses that do not add value to the country’s development is commendable. According to the minister, only courses that help the country attain its Vision 2030 will receive government funding.

This comes in the wake of an approaching high-level summit on Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that will see over 150 heads of state or government gather at the UN Headquarters in New York to assess the status of the MDGs targets and revitalize efforts to meet the eight anti-poverty goals by the 2015 deadline.

According to the 2010 World Bank global monitoring report, "Sub- Saharan Africa poses the greatest challenge, it has the highest poverty rates and will have the most difficulty achieving its regional poverty reduction targets."

This dismal scenario is partly attributable to the fact that the region has either not devised homegrown strategies to meet its developmental needs or is using a foreign template to address its issues. Making MDGs donor-centric has not only denied Africa an opportunity to engage in internal transformation, but it has also reduced indigenous expertise to that of measuring and reporting back to donors.

It is in this light that Ruto’s push to domesticate Kenya’s higher education to meet the country’s developmental needs ought to be emulated by African governments. Africans ought to proactively probe their developmental systems with a view of discarding those that do not work for them. This will stem the chronic dependency; brain drain; inability to forge solutions to Africa’s many challenges and counterproductive advise administered by the so called 'development experts.'