University of Nairobi featured in list of world's best 200 universities

The University of Nairobi has been ranked among the best 200 universities in the emerging world economies.

The university emerged position 174 out of 200 in the BRICS & Emerging Economies Rankings category of the UK's Times Higher Education magazine.

Kenya is represented in the ranking for the first time.

Other countries that participated for the first time include Nigeria, Ghana, Jordan, Qatar and Oman while Egypt returned to the ranking, having had no institutions represented last year.

The 2016 rankings included 200 institutions from 35 countries, up from 100 from 18 countries in 2015.

Times Higher Education World University Rankings Editor Phil Baty said the list are based on established and trusted thirteen performance indicators.

Mr Baty said the indicators were specially calibrated to reflect the development priorities of universities in emerging economies.

EXPANDED RANKING

“Kenya is one of several countries to have made its debut in this year’s BRICS and Emerging Economies Rankings, with the University of Nairobi featuring in joint 174th place,” he said.

Mr Baty went on: “This achievement is in part due to expanding the ranking to cover 200 universities and 48 countries but it is an important milestone for Kenya’s universities to be recognised in such a prestigious ranking.”

He said all the core missions of the modern global university - research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international activity - were considered.

The invitation-only academic survey included responses from more than 10,000 senior academics in 2014-15 and research excellence were assessed through the examination of more than 11 million research papers, up from six million last year with 51 million citations up from 50 million last year.

Arts, humanities and social sciences were placed on an equal footing with the sciences.

CHINA DOMINATES RANKING

China dominates the rankings this year with 39 universities, Taiwan came second with 24 universities, while India was third with 16.

The best university was Peking University (China) followed by Tsinghua University (China), third was Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia), fourth was University of Cape Town (South Africa).

Others were National Taiwan University (Taiwan), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), University of Science and Technology of China (China), Zhejiang University (China), University of São Paulo (Brazil) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China).

Some of the the indicators that were used in the ranking include research income from industry, academic staff, teaching and the learning environment.

Others were the staff-to-student ratio, quality of undergraduate and doctoral degrees awarded.