Forum for Innovation in African Universities (FIAU)

Accelerating Innovation in African Universities

Topic: Africa’s Higher Education Resilience post- COVID-19

While Africa has had a lower prevalence and consequently a lesser mortality rate from the COVID-19 pandemic, the region bears the brunt of the socio-economic impact of the diseases. Contributing factors, such as, limited employment protection and employer recovery stimulus, weaker resilient infrastructures to keep schools open during the lockdown, especially at the higher education level, meant that the adverse effects of the pandemic have nearly wiped away more than a decade’s progress to improve life chances for young Africans. Although African universities marginally contribute to these regional challenges, they nonetheless share a big chunk of the blame in churning out unemployable graduates. Because of this there is a pressure on them to establish effective systems to ensure that they can withstand the varying challenges of the 21^st century.

But the main problem is that African universities suffer from a deep-seated financial and capability challenges, which call into question the quality of their programmes and teaching personnel. To address this problem, African universities must become entrepreneurial. Through market-driven curriculum, commercialisation of intellectual assets, formation of academic-industry partnership, investment in entrepreneurship education and innovation centres to support student and graduate start-ups, African universities can become entrepreneurial. Thereby, begin to generate sustainable income streams to build resilient infrastructures, and ultimately play a more active role to spur economic growth in their countries.

The Centre for African Entrepreneurship and Leadership (CAEL) has been at the forefront of working closely with Africa’s higher education stakeholders to support a cohort of African universities to transition into entrepreneurial entities. Under our newly launched pan-African knowledge exchange platform: Forum for Innovation in African Universities (FIAU), we are building upon our on-going work with these stakeholders to host our next Global Annual Meeting themed: “Entrepreneurial University in Africa – prospects and challenges”. This hybrid event will bring together some of Africa’s leading minds in academia, business, government and the third sector as well as global ecosystem players - all with a keen interest in supporting African universities to transition into entrepreneurial entities post Covid-19. The Meeting will be guided by the following four tracks:

1. Building a culture of entrepreneurship in universities
2. Pathways to entrepreneurial university
3. Global best practices in entrepreneurial university
4. Researching African academic as an “intrapreneur” – from ‘bureaucracy to adhocracy’