Africa’s universities are selling the future to pay for today

The crisis facing Africa’s universities is often told through a familiar and visceral narrative of material decay: overcrowded lecture halls, under-equipped laboratories, and crumbling campuses.

While this physical neglect is real, it is merely a symptom of a far more profound and insidious crisis. The untold story is not one of passive decline but of an active, forced transformation of institutional purpose.

Starved of predictable and adequate state support, universities across the continent are being quietly reshaped, their foundational mission as creators of public good eroding under the relentless pressure to become self-sustaining commercial enterprises.

This is not simply a story of austerity; it is the story of a great repurposing where the university’s social compact with the nation is being rewritten under duress. In the starkest terms, African universities are being forced to sell off the continent’s future to keep the lights on today.

Anatomy of neglect

Historically, the post-colonial African university was vested with a profound dual mandate. It was conceived as the primary engine of national development, tasked with producing the skilled human capital necessary to build modern, independent states.

Simultaneously, it was envisioned as a project of societal ‘repair’, a space for decolonising knowledge, forging national identity, and redressing the deep inequalities of the past. In this vision, the university was the quintessential public good, an institution whose benefits – an educated citizenry, a repository of shared knowledge, and a commitment to equity – would radiate throughout society.

This foundational social compact is now being systematically dismantled, not by choice, but by fiscal coercion.

The anatomy of this fiscal neglect is stark. Across the continent, state investment in higher education has failed to keep pace with burgeoning student populations and growing economies.

The mean spending on education by African governments remains static at 3.7% of GDP, falling short of the 4% minimum international benchmark.

A deeper look reveals a widespread failure of commitment: only 29% of African nations meet both the minimum benchmarks of dedicating at least 4% of GDP and 15% of total public expenditure to education.

The costs of higher education and access

This is not a temporary anomaly but a chronic condition. The state’s retreat has not eliminated the costs of higher education; it has merely shifted them onto two other actors: households and foreign donors.

Families across Africa now contribute a staggering 27% of total education spending. This is most visible in the relentless rise of tuition fees, which sparked continent-wide protests like South Africa’s #FeesMustFall movement. In Kenya, public universities have proposed doubling tuition for state-sponsored students just to fund basic operations. This escalating cost creates a crisis of affordability, fundamentally challenging the principle of accessible public education.

‘Perilous dependency’

In parallel, the void left in research funding is being filled by international donors. This creates a perilous dependency, a double-edged sword that provides a lifeline while simultaneously compromising institutional sovereignty.

Up to 60% of research funding for Africa’s top universities is sourced from outside the continent. This funding, however, is rarely neutral.

It often comes with agendas that align with the strategic interests of Northern funders, which may not correspond to the most pressing local needs. This dynamic perpetuates a neo-colonial relationship in knowledge production, where African researchers become implementers of externally conceived agendas rather than drivers of their own.

Through its fiscal inaction, the state is actively privatising the cost of education and outsourcing the direction of its national research agenda.

Neoliberal turn

This financial pressure did not arise in a vacuum. It was legitimised by a powerful global ideological shift that systematically dismantled the concept of higher education as a public good.

Beginning in the 1980s, influential bodies like the World Bank promoted a neoliberal worldview that reframed education as a private commodity whose value is measured primarily by its economic rate of return. The student was no longer a citizen to be developed but a ‘customer’ to be served.

This ideology spurred the rise of managerialism within university governance. The focus shifted from academic freedom to a new lexicon of efficiency, performance metrics, and cost-benefit analysis.

The state’s withdrawal of funds was no longer seen as a failure of public policy but as a necessary and even desirable step towards forcing universities to become more ‘efficient’ and ‘responsive’ to the market.

This potent feedback loop – where financial pressure and political ideology reinforce one another – relentlessly pushes the African university away from its public mission and deeper into the logic of the market.

Consequences

The consequences of this commercial turn are devastating. To maximise revenue from tuition, universities are incentivised to massify enrolment, particularly in cheap-to-deliver programmes in the humanities and social sciences.

This erodes educational quality, as large class sizes limit meaningful interaction and force pedagogy to regress towards rote memorisation. The university risks becoming a credential factory, manufacturing certificates rather than cultivating deep knowledge.

Furthermore, this pivot creates a profound ‘innovation paradox’. The pressure to generate revenue skews research priorities away from foundational, curiosity-driven inquiry and towards short-term, applied projects with clear commercial potential.

While this may yield immediate profits, it fundamentally undermines the long-term innovation pipeline. Major technological breakthroughs are built upon a deep reservoir of knowledge generated by basic research.

By focusing almost exclusively on commercialisation, universities are harvesting the fruits of past investments without planting the seeds for future discoveries. They are hollowing out the very innovation system they are supposed to lead.

Commercial model drives inequality

Finally, the commercial model is a powerful driver of inequality. High tuition fees erect formidable barriers for students from low-income backgrounds, transforming the university from an engine of social mobility into a reinforcer of intergenerational poverty.

These risks are creating a starkly two-tiered system where a small elite can afford a quality education, while the majority are either excluded or relegated to under-resourced, massified institutions.

Reversing this trajectory requires a radical recommitment to the university as a public good. First and foremost, African governments must reverse the trend of disinvestment. They must develop credible plans to meet and exceed international funding benchmarks and ‘ringfence’ higher education budgets to protect them from political and economic volatility. Public funding is not a subsidy; it is the non-negotiable cornerstone of a healthy and innovative nation.

Second, while state commitment is essential, sustainability lies in the intelligent diversification of revenue. This means moving beyond simplistic tuition hikes to explore more equitable models, such as developing endowment funds, strengthening pan-African research collaborations to pool resources, and implementing income-contingent loan systems whereby repayments are tied to a graduate’s earnings.

Finally, we must reclaim the very definition of university ‘success’ from the narrow logic of the market. We need a ‘Balanced Scorecard’ for our universities – an evaluation framework that measures and rewards institutions, not just for patents and profits, but for their contributions to the public good. We must value their success in promoting social equity, their role in creating foundational knowledge, and their stewardship of our cultural heritage.

The future of African innovation, democracy and development hinges on our willingness to reclaim the university’s purpose before it is irrevocably lost to the market. The choice is clear: will our universities continue to be forced to sell off the continent’s future intellectual capital to keep the lights on today, or will we reinvest in them as the unique public institutions they are: engines of knowledge, pillars of democracy, and beacons of hope for a more equitable and prosperous future?

Dr Kende Kefale is a senior information analyst at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he applies social systems theory to transform complex institutional challenges into data-driven solutions. He pioneers new analytics research and prototypes that innovate how information is leveraged to illuminate and optimise university operations.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.