Overview

I spent the past four years as one of the curriculum leads for a pan-African university that aimed to create a network of tertiary institutions across Africa. The principle goal of our work was to support young, talented Africans through intentional leadership development, an emphasis on project based, constructivist learning, and exposure to peers and mentors from across the continent and the world. Because of a lack of public investment in higher ed, we elected to go a for-profit route, raising money from mainly US and European investors. While this fueled our growth across Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, it also created a tension – pressure to scale and expand, even with patient capital, in the face of fine tuning and refining our learning environment.

Because of the scope of the project, I’d like to focus on a few areas of critique introduced in class.

Problem Definition: Were we solving the “right” problem?

We were addressing challenges related to lack of access to high quality tertiary education: In Sub-Saharan Africa only 9% of people enroll in higher education. Compare that to 27% in India, 36% globally, 48% in China, and 79% in the US (World Bank 2016). And data that we drew on suggested that there was growing demand for tertiary education.

Of the students who do make it to university, many struggle to find jobs. Even the ones who find jobs are often either underemployed or reported as lacking relevant skills, suggesting that tertiary institutions don’t necessarily support students to succeed after graduation – a challenge that we fleshed out more through research into other institutions. We attributed this to four intersecting challenges: (a) Wrong outcomes: Most universities do not prepare students with general problem solving, cognitive, or contextual skills to excel in complex, changing environments and at best do this accidentally (b) instructionist, ineffective pedagogy (c) poor linkages to employers or to career opportunities and (d) high cost of relevant training or opportunities.

However, I think we struggled with scoping the problem. For example, in our early days, we attempted to not only design a curriculum from scratch, but also tried to build important tech systems internally (e.g. a learning management system, admissions platform, etc.), which diluted our resources across a range of complex challenges. Similarly, we increasingly began to delve into diverse offerings beyond our “core” undergraduate offering – corporate short courses, an MBA program, executive courses, a second campus, and finally an unaccredited offering which we hoped to become our engine for growth.

On the one hand, we often created new offerings based on market “pull” (e.g. companies would be thrilled by our interns and then ask us to “do the same thing” for their staff). We also needed to keep generating revenue while our students remained in school (many were able to afford our university due to Income Sharing Agreements) and while we scaled up our numbers. We also pivoted our focus to a lower cost unaccredited offering because of a hypothesis that our main undergraduate offering was too expensive – and therefore our engine for growth would need to come from somewhere else.

While I think we handled the challenges related to outsider perspective (our team hailed from 20+ countries across Africa, 30+ countries across the world, with diverse disciplinary, and socioeconomic backgrounds; we were disciplined in participatory design with students, employers, families, and governments; and regularly adapted our design based on feedback from various stakeholders), I think we struggled most with incentives. Because we were for-profit and venture backed, and despite having patient capital that explicitly supported our efforts to iterate and refine our offerings, there remained pressure to scale before a number of us felt we were ready. Instead of running smaller, lower stakes, in market-experiments, we found ourselves launching larger launches with real students – and while we were open to pivoting and adapting, this urgency to scale often came into tension with efforts to refine.

Lastly, I think we underestimated the value of particular kinds of expertise. While we had a diverse and talented team, few of us had depth in learning design – and were developing these fundamental skills while building our offerings – one of the principal reasons I returned to grad school was to deepen my own expertise in constructionist learning design.

Despite these challenges, the organization is still doing quite well. We’re still being featured quite prominently (most recently on Bill Gate’s blog) – and I’ve seen the impact our work has had on our students and their respective communities (from a student who employees 40 people outside Kampala to students who’ve tinkered with ML and AI to develop all kinds of art and smart agro tech to activists engaged in political reform in South Africa and Zimbabwe). Like all organizations (e.g. similar to Mkopa from last week), we navigated and continue to navigate a range of design tensions. And hopefully will continue to balance these tensions productively.