Collaboration aims to help make Africa’s youth an asset

As Africa’s population continues to grow, and with a large young generation, a group of African universities united under the Education Collaborative are trying to find ways to make young people become an asset to the continent, Rose Dodd, executive director of the Education Collaborative said.

The Education Collaborative is led by the Ghana-based Ashesi University. It is a consortium of African higher education (HE) institutions with a common goal: to transform systems and improve institutional, regulatory and student outcomes in African HE.

Addressing an HE stakeholder meeting in Accra on 14 June 2023, Dodd said that, since the launch of the collaborative, they have been driven by a firm conviction that this effort has to be a collective one. “No single organisation can really address the issue and, as we began to engage others across the African HE space, we found that we were not the only ones with such a conviction.”

She said many universities and tertiary institutions have and continue to participate in efforts to build coalitions and partnerships that provide different strengths towards this similar vision. “However, the Education Collaborative is attempting to build a coalition at a scale that has not been seen on the continent. We are looking at 140 members at least, influencing hundreds more and collectively driving successful learning outcomes for at least one million students by 2030.”

Collaboration is inspiring

Dodd said it was a good example to see leaders connecting and working together, as well as meeting often to discuss and share the challenges they face in their institutions. These include educating the youth and developing curricula and policies, as well as operational issues.

“It is really good to see the organic connection between these leaders as they tackle the challenges of HE in East Africa towards the development of the continent. The connections they created have now expanded beyond the individual executives to their leadership and through to their faculties and staff,” she added.

Dodd said the collaborative is facilitating good strategy and plans for shared curricula in addition to talks around student exchanges, shared models of leadership development and joint research and programme development.

Professor Angela Owusu-Ansah, the provost at Ashesi University in Berekuso, Ghana, said the meeting was meant to share and reflect on the past three years of building the capacity of the institutions to improve African HE institutions.

Incentivising staff

“Today’s world needs people with ethics, prepared to act ethically to help those in need and to participate meaningfully in our increasingly diverse and global society,” Owusu-Ansah said, adding that providing students with the best possible education offer means “changing what we do, and that means time and work”.

She said that a large contingent of the HE community has no real incentive to change how they help students learn. “And if there is little incentive to change or to be innovative, there is little reason to assess how long we have been keeping our promises. How can we incentivise faculty and staff?

Owusu-Ansah said the personal judgments of the leaders were not enough, and to be able to ensure that they provide the right context, there is a need to compare against some kind of appropriate justifiable, rigorous target or benchmark, such as consulting more with others – employers, graduate programmes, disciplinary associations and, perhaps, colleagues at peer institutions.

“We now live and work in the business as unusual world. Change and transformation have always been with us but, lately, even the rate of change is increasing, and transformation has multiplied,” she said. “We should expect to assess trajectories towards transformation rather than determine whether the transformation has occurred because it is a mono or moving target.”

Dynamic understanding of sustainability

Owusu-Ansah said the application of the criteria will change how we think about how change happens. “Truly transforming systems require integrating second theories of change – not just one – to build critical mass transformational tipping points.”

She said evaluators will have to emerge and engage in practice with a complex systems concept, with full cost accounting that calculates the more comprehensive cost and benefits of changes that have taken place. They will also have to adopt a dynamic rather than a static understanding of sustainability and effect systems, levels of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Some institutions have started posting their rankings and cautioned that numbers need to be put into context and translated into information to have meaning. “Yet we brag about our award-winning students, lab teams, or star alumni. But these anecdotes do not work any more.”