Transforming African higher education: Access, engagement, repair

This CGHE webinar seminar series brings together senior and early career researchers to reflect on the challenges facing higher education systems across sub-saharan Africa, as universities work to repair damaging colonial legacies and ways of thinking.

Across five weeks, we explore the challenges of widening access, academic freedom, community engagement, institutional change and ecological sustainability. Kojo Botsio shows how Ghanaian university expansion to meet growing rural student demand reinforces inequalities of access. Paul Michael describes how Eurocentric pedagogies continue to constrain the academic freedoms of students across the continent. Claire McCann shows how the South African policy focus on transformation sees universities such as Rhodes prioritise community engagement and dialogue. Such examples of institutional change reward close study and theorisation, a task taken up by Joe Bazirake. Finally, Melanie Walker shows how a capability approach can be used for researching and envisioning ecological justice within Higher Education.

2 June: Do you want to hear more about my survival strategies? Rural youth narratives of their journeys to and through university in Ghana

Speaker: Kojo Botsio, University of Oxford

With growing demand for access to higher education in Africa, the rural-urban divide in participation rates across the continent is an area of key policy concern. In Ghana, the Free Senior High School (SHS) programme has increased high school enrolment and resulted in increased demand for university spaces, especially from young people in rural areas However, the perspectives of rural youth on their own university journeys and experiences are often overlooked in academic and public discourse on widening university access and participation in Africa.

In Kojo’s research, he seeks to amplify the voices and lived perspectives of rural youth about their journeys to, and experiences in, Ghanaian universities. He will focus on the life stories of rural youth attending public university in Ghana’s capital, Accra, highlighting how rural inequality is compounded by ethnicity, gender, mature student status, and disability.

He employs a narrative research methodology, using open-ended non-directive narrative interviews to elicit rural youth accounts. He also engaged with other stakeholders, patrons and enablers who enable rural youth university journeys. He used observational methods to describe the lived university experiences of rural youth, and the barriers and support structures they encounter on their journeys. Their voices and perspectives need to inform access and participation policy in Ghana and beyond.

More information here. 

9 June: Eurocentric-African higher education, students’ academic freedom constraints and coloniality of youth 

Speaker: Paul Michael, University of the Free State

Due to the link between culture and development, educating higher education students through and integrating them into their culture are ideals for fostering endogenous development. But Eurocentrism, which emerges from and was solidified through colonialism and its long-term effects, plagues Africa’s higher education, fracturing its students’ cultural identity and limiting their capacity to engender development. In this talk, Paul will discuss Africa’s higher education students’ academic freedom constraints in relation to culture and education from a decolonial perspective. Drawing on what academic freedom might mean in relation to an education that fails to transmit knowledge through and integrate students into their culture, Paul argues that by being overwhelmingly Eurocentric, higher education in contemporary Africa constitutes academic freedom constraints that amount to coloniality of youth.

More information here. 

16 June: (Un)making the engaged African university: Rethinking community engagement through history and lived experience in South Africa

Speaker: Claire McCann, University of Oxford

Dominant frameworks of higher education community engagement, largely derived from North American contexts, may be grounded in assumptions that do not fully account for the colonial and postcolonial trajectories of South African higher education. This webinar therefore rethinks community engagement in South African higher education by placing contemporary practice in dialogue with longer intellectual and political histories of the ‘African university’. To do this, this presentation draws on historical analysis of the evolution of African universities alongside narrative portraits of community–university relationships in Makhanda, South Africa. These portraits foreground lived experiences of community partners, students, and academics who inhabit and traverse the boundaries of ‘university’ and ‘community’.

By bringing historical and lived perspectives into conversation, the presentation seeks to advance three contributions. Firstly, it argues that community engagement is not a recent or imported institutional function, but part of an enduring and contested project of defining the social purpose of the African university. Secondly, it reconceptualises the relationship between university and community: rather than functioning as a bridge between two discrete entities, community engagement reveals the ways in which these domains are already entangled through shared histories and overlapping identities. Individuals move between roles as students, community members, educators, and activists, unsettling the boundaries that community engagement is often assumed to traverse. Finally, it examines the potential of community engagement to transform both higher education institutions and the communities that surround them, arguing that it is neither inherently emancipatory nor extractive. Its effects are contingent on the everyday practices through which it is enacted, and the levels of institutional support for these practices.

More information here. 

23 June: When Change Isn’t Change: Rethinking Transformation in African Higher Education

Speaker: Joe Bazirake, Nelson Mandela University

African higher education systems are undergoing profound transformation shaped by historical legacies, global pressures, and local demands for relevance and justice. Yet prevailing frameworks of institutional change often fail to capture the complexity, contradictions, and unevenness of these processes. Drawing on insights from Higher Education Institutional Change: Perspectives from South Africa, this talk reconceptualises institutional change as a continuous, contested, and deeply contextual process rather than a linear or measurable outcome.

Using the South African higher education landscape as a critical lens, the talk explores how universities operate as both organisations and socially embedded institutions, simultaneously navigating internal logics and broader socio-political forces. It highlights how change is mediated through cultural embeddedness, power interplays, and temporal layering, producing transformations that are often partial, negotiated, and paradoxical.

The presentation advances four key propositions: that context is central to institutional change; that history should be understood as a resource for reimagining futures; that change is layered across policy, structure, culture, and practice; and that institutional equilibrium is continuously negotiated rather than achieved. By foregrounding these insights, the talk argues for a more nuanced, context-sensitive approach to transformation in African higher education that recognises both the limits and possibilities of change in historically uneven systems.

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30 June: Developing an ecological capability and functionings for African and global higher education 

Speaker: Melanie Walker, University of the Free State

In the face of climate injustice and centuries of ecological degradation affecting the most vulnerable globally, there is a growing need to reimagine the role of higher education in fostering alternative visions of integrated social and ecological wellbeing, and in developing ways of knowing, teaching, and researching to re-imagine higher education contributions in fostering a wellbeing, relational ethics for a living planet. To this end, and drawing on the capability approach, a framework for harmonious ‘wellbeing’ flourishing of planet and people as the evaluative space is outlined, connecting and generatively aligning a ‘kaleidoscope’ of three conceptual approaches. The umbrella idea is the fostering of equitable wellbeing and flourishing living based in Sen’s and Nussbaum’s respective capability/capabilities approach. The basic conceptual architecture of the capability approach is outlined making the case for the formation of a relational ecological capability and corresponding transformative learning, as well as for attention to evaluating institutions. Sen and Nussbaum’s relational, freedoms centred anthropology, which we might understand as recognizing the relational value of nature for human flourishing, further addresses the criticism that the approach is only human-centred and individualistic. On the other hand, the capability approach does not pay adequate attention to power, colonial histories or cobeing so that I necessarily expand the approach by drawing on African knowledges. Firstly, Achille Mbembe’s planetary habitability requires sharing, caring for and repairing the earth and attends to our relationships with non-human beings and to the spiritual. His ecological approach is integrated with an African environmental ethics with particular focus on the southern Africa moral philosophy of ubuntu. Finally, drawing across these intersectional frames, an ecological capability is roughly sketched for further development and public debate, and something is briefly said regarding what higher education is and does, as well as what it is for, by foregrounding knowledge, pedagogical processes and learning aimed at harmonious flourishing.

More information.