Africa‘s higher education debate spent a decade arguing about quality. The 12th Future of Education Summit, held Thursday under the theme “Igniting Africa’s Knowledge Economy Through Future Ready Campuses,” spent the day arguing about arithmetic.
Across six panels, two fireside conversations, a keynote and a closing address, the number that kept resurfacing was supply. Sub-Saharan Africa’s gross enrolment ratio is around 9.5% to 10%, University of Southampton Vice-President Andrew Atherton told the opening panel. South Africa, among the continent’s highest, sits at roughly 27%. Systems with significant participation run above 50%.
“The critical structural issue that Africa needs is it needs more universities and more university places,” Atherton said. “I’m less concerned, once that structural problem is addressed, about the quality of higher education.”
The financing session put a national number on it. About 850,000 students matriculated in South Africa last year against roughly 250,000 university places, Graduate Institute of Financial Sciences CEO Kershen Pillay said, with more than 400,000 left outside the post-school system entirely.
Transnational Academic Group President and Senior Executive Officer Dan Adkins scaled it to the continent in his closing remarks. “If the entire number of seats from the top 400 universities in the world were made available just to African students, it still would not be 50% of the amount of seats that will be needed by 2050.”
Infrastructure, not expenditure
ABN Group co-founder and chairman Dr Rakesh Wahi, who founded the summit, opened with a proposal aimed at treasuries rather than campuses.
“When we build a road, we understand that it enables commerce. When we build a port, it enables trade. When we build a university, we are building the human infrastructure that makes all other infrastructure productive,” Wahi said. “A future ready campus is therefore an investment in productivity and must be treated as an infrastructure project.”
He set the demographic context that framed the rest of the day: roughly 60% of Africans under 24 on UNESCO estimates, about 35% of the world’s youth African by 2050, against South African unemployment above 30% and youth unemployment above 60%.
His proposed measure of a university was not enrolment. “We should be asking every university, what problems are you solving? What research are you commercializing? And what companies are emerging from your campuses?”
Capability before capital
The financing panel produced the day’s most contrarian consensus: money is not the first constraint.
“Africa doesn’t have a capital problem. It has a capability problem that looks like a capital problem,” Henley Business School Africa Dean Jon Foster-Pedley said. “Money is the third question for me, not the first. Purpose first, capability second, then finance.”
Stadio Education CEO Stan du Plessis went further, arguing South African public higher education is generously funded as a share of GDP relative to wealthier economies, and that the failure is in the operating model. African institutions, he said, imported a cost structure from research-intensive universities in the global north that only balances with an endowment.
“The annual revenue of Harvard is sufficient to pay for 45% of the annual cost of running Harvard. The other 55% comes from their $55 billion endowment,” du Plessis said. “African universities do not have $55 billion endowments.”
Private higher education has more than doubled its share of South African enrolment over the past decade to around a quarter, he said, while public enrolment stagnated.
Both men were scathing about the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. Du Plessis called it “fundamentally flawed.” The panel heard that more than 53,000 students applied for the missing middle loan this year and just over 3,000 were assessed as eligible.
The counter-argument on access came from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. NSFAS has approved funding for more than 1.2 million students this year across universities and TVET colleges, Thea van der Westhuizen said, before adding the qualifier that ran through the afternoon: “Access is only the first step. Inclusion means that students need to get in, get through, and get going.”
The ‘job ready’ fight
The academia and industry panel turned into a sustained rejection of the phrase employers use most.
“No graduate, no matter what people do, will be job ready,” Australian Institute of Management CEO Gary Martin said. “The language is all wrong. They should be prepared for the workplace, but they will not be job ready.”
GIBS Dean Morris Mthombeni supplied the evidence base, citing the 70:20:10 rule: 10% of professional learning happens in the classroom, 20% through coaching and observation, 70% on the job. “To now expect to flip that table to say the university is going to take up 70% of the load is misguided.”
Transnational Academic Group Managing Director of Operations Shweta Wahi reframed the relationship. “There’s a thought that universities are the producers of talent and companies are essentially the consumers. But that model needs to change. Employers need to become co-producers of talent.”
Pan-Atlantic University Vice-Chancellor Enase Okonedo raised the bar past employment. “Job readiness suggests that you’re ready for the jobs of today. But Africa needs opportunity creators.”
AI, with an asterisk
Artificial intelligence ran through every session, and almost nobody treated it as a straightforward gain.
The hardest numbers came from the AI panel. Universal connectivity across Africa would cost about $100 billion on 2024 World Bank estimates, Johannesburg Business School Executive Dean Alistair Mokoena said, funding roughly 240,000 base stations and 240,000km of fibre. About 700 million of 1.6 billion Africans are online today.
Adkins warned that AI hallucinations have entered the citable academic literature, forcing reviewers to verify every reference. UN University Rector Tshilidzi Marwala offered the illustration: a paper he never wrote, with co-authors he has never worked with, has been cited more than ten times.
Education consultant Jaye Richards-Hill delivered the finding that unsettled the room most: students reporting extensive AI use are achieving lower outcomes than their peers.
Her conclusion became the summit’s closing line, repeated by Adkins nearly six hours later. “Education isn’t technological. It’s fundamentally human.”
Look sideways, not north
The afternoon produced the most pointed self-criticism of the day, from Wits Business School Interim Head Logan Rangasamy.
“We in Africa tend to want to collaborate a lot and much more easily with universities in the north, and we don’t have collaboration across the African continent,” he said. “We have pockets of excellence. In the digital space probably there’s no other better hub than in Kenya. But institutions in the north are training their AI models by using Africans in Kenya.”
The counter-evidence came from transnational campuses. Lancaster University Ghana draws 60% of its students from 26 other African nations, Provost Emmanuel Arthur said, against roughly 500,000 Africans a year who still leave the continent to study.
On research, advisor to South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education Ihron Rensburg called for a pivot from 50 years of undergraduate investment into postgraduate and research capacity, and said South Africa’s research spend as a share of GDP is half of where it should be.
What happens next
Adkins ended with a list rather than a flourish: industry input into curriculum, industry ownership of graduate induction, scalable blended models that solve device and data access first, early childhood literacy and numeracy prioritised over classroom technology, and public-private financing that is agnostic between public and private providers.
“Educating our children is a public good,” he said. “It’s something that we should all contribute to and we will all benefit from in the long run.”
The summit returns in 2027.
