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This paper explores some of the recent developments and transformations in Africa's higher education.

It employs an extensive review of literature based on some dominant thematic areas characterizing the main trends and developments in Africa's higher education.

The paper mainly highlights the impacts of academic partnerships on these transformations, with a focus on research, postgraduate training, mobility and some new intra-African initiatives. Following the unprecedented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalization comes out as an important turning point for Africa's higher education, which should be exploited for more opportunities. The paper calls for collaborative efforts to address the challenges facing Africa's higher education for the repositioning of Africa as a meaningful player in the unfolding global knowledge society.

The outcomes could be useful to researchers focused on international education, policymakers and higher education leaders and international development partners working on higher education in Africa. It could also be useful for structuring future collaborations between Africa and other regions of the world.

The paper calls for enhanced and mutually beneficial collaborations and disruption of the imbalances that have characterised North–South collaborations. It proposes some possible approaches and alternatives that could be used for redress.

The paper is original and relies on some of the new developments in Africa, including the impacts of COVID-19 and digitalization on the future of higher education collaborations with Africa.

The African continent is filled with a textured history, vast resources, and immense opportunity. The landscape of higher education on such a diverse continent is extensive and complex. In this review of the landscape, four primary topics are evaluated. The historical context is the foundational heading, which briefly covers the evolution from colonization to independence and the knowledge economy. The second main heading builds upon the historical context to provide an overview of the numerous components of higher education, including language diversity, institutional type, and access to education. A third section outlines key challenges and opportunities including finance, governance, organizational effectiveness, and the academic core. Each of these challenges and opportunities is interconnected and moves from external influences (e.g., fiscal and political climate) to internal influences (e.g., administrative leadership and faculty roles). The last layer of the landscape focuses on leveraging higher education in Africa for social and economic progress and development. Shaping a higher education system around principles of the public good and generating social benefits is important for including postsecondary institutions in a development strategy.

Purpose – This chapter explores how a group of African academics at a university in South Africa experience belonging at varying levels of geographical scale. It considers how race, class and professional status intersect to influence the scholars’ experiences.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Narrative interviews were conducted with 24 individuals from nine African countries. All were current doctoral or postdoctoral fellows at the University of the Free State. The focus is decidedly qualitative in approach, with an emphasis on understanding the subjectivity of the people under study.

Findings – The interviews reveal that, while participants have struggled to forge a sense of belonging to South African society due to high levels of xenophobia and structural racism, they have found other spaces to validate their professional identities and, hence, forge a sense of belonging. These spaces include certain university departments and meeting places at the university. Importantly, these spaces have a very specific, local location, but are international in their linkages and their orientation. The professional identity of the scholars helps them overcome challenges to traditional modes of belonging based on race and class in the South African context.

Originality/Value – The findings contribute to broader discussions on the scale of migrant belongings and on the increasingly complex ways migrants relate to space and place. It also offers a new perspective on the belonging(s) of international scholars, which is largely understudied in the South African context.

This paper draws on the extant literature and experiences of selected ACBF‐supported programs to interrogate approaches to enhancing institutional leadership in African universities. The paper posits that African universities must proactively take charge of fostering institutional leadership so as to translate leadership competence into strategic assets. Such assets are key to bolstering intellectual capital, strategic scanning, i.e. the capacity to recognize the behaviour of interconnected systems to make effective decisions under varying strategic and risk scenarios, and the transformation of knowledge. To this end, African universities need to transcend their current “modern” system of education to a post‐modern perspective, which recognizes context, collaboration and knowledge as valued skills. Enhancing institutional leadership is also crucial if Africa is to compete in today’s rapidly globalizing world and knowledge society. More importantly, doing so has direct impact on shaping the quality of leadership on the Continent, and consequently the resulting policy decisions and governance. The paper concludes that while institutional, political, demographic as well as resource challenges exist, African universities today, are uniquely positioned as a result of uptake of knowledge management, strengthened private‐public partnerships and advances in ICT to enhance institutional leadership.

What are the current trends that mark out the process of internationalization of higher education? In what directions do these trends influence the direction of research and development in African universities? Does internationalization of higher education have the potential to boost knowledge production relevant to Africa’s development needs or it will further hasten the marginalization of both African universities and African development agendas within the global network of scientific knowledge? Internationalization of education is not new. Historically, students have sought better higher education abroad influenced by the desire to benefit from better opportunities provided by universities in the developed countries. The current phase of higher education internationalization has however emerged more vigorously in the 21st century and is associated with the twin trends of globalization and liberalization. Proponents of globalization have argued that higher education is bound to be more strongly affected by worldwide economic developments. They also point out that higher education institutions in developing countries should embrace aspects of internationalization to boost their efforts to be ranked among the best league of universities globally. At the national level, internationalization of higher education is presented as a process that institutions in developing countries must embrace in order to address the persistent challenges of sustainable development. For universities in Africa, the literature argues that internationalization provides them with opportunities that cut across disciplines, institutions, knowledge-systems, and nation-state boundaries thereby exposing the institutions and academics to the world’s best scientific research and infrastructures. In summary, it is contended that internationalization is a strategy to realize success in human-capability and institutional-capacity development in the universities. This chapter revisits these assertions and their tenacity to developing a culture of research and innovation in African universities, and linking the universities to the continent’s development aspirations.

This chapter discusses the role of language in the transformation of two African institutions of higher education, namely the University of Botswana (in Botswana) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (in South Africa). The transformation of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which is aimed at addressing the inequalities and other ills of the apartheid era, has taken on board language issues. For instance, isiZulu is being developed and promoted to join English as a language of scholarship. In contrast, the University of Botswana’s transformation does not stem from a political background of oppression. The institutional transformation has to do internationalization and the conversion into a research-intensive university. This transformation, unlike at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has not taken a strong move to develop and promote Setswana (Botswana’s national language) as a language of scholarship.

This chapter grapples with questions of agency in the development of African higher education, with a special focus on the Association of African Universities (AAU), an organization outside of formal education policymaking on the continent. Through the lens of rhetorical institutionalism, findings illustrate how the AAU has adopted and adapted competing institutional logics to exert influence over development policymaking. Next, I will discuss how systems of persuasion were cultivated and symbols employed to establish the legitimacy of the organization in a heterogeneous institutional field that includes universities, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations, supranational arrangements, and the influence of international financial institutions. This enabled the AAU to extend institutional logics into African higher education. This case study seeks to upend the pervasive crisis narrative that perpetuates both the impotence of African institutions and the stewardship of outside development elites. Finally this chapter considers the implications of this critical case study for development discourse and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the profiles of Australian, New Zealand and South African accounting faculty members. Additionally, the study investigates whether there are any differences in research productivity of the accounting faculty between countries as measured by peer-reviewed academic journal output.

This archival study uses details obtained from webpages of Departments of Accounting in the three countries to construct a profile of accounting academics.

Significant differences in the profiles of accounting academics were found that can be attributed to the institutional factors that exist in each country. Staffs at the junior lecturer and lecturer levels are more likely to be female, while senior lecturers and professors in all three countries were more likely to be male. While Australia and New Zealand had a similar percentage of staff holding PhD or equivalent academic qualifications, only a small proportion of the South African faculty held PhD or equivalent qualifications. A greater proportion of the South African faculty was professionally qualified compared to their Australian and New Zealand counterparts. New Zealand accounting faculty was more productive than their Australian colleagues, with South African academics being the least productive. Academics holding a doctoral qualification or equivalent were more productive than those that did not.

The research limitations relate to the use of websites as the primary data source. Incompleteness of information, inconsistencies in the type of information presented and a lack of comparability of information across institutions and countries may have led to some errors and omissions. However, given the relatively large sample size of 2,049 academics, this was not deemed to materially affect the final analysis.

The paper provides an important contribution to the literature on accounting academics. It is the first of its kind to present a comprehensive “snapshot” of the profiles of accounting academics at the universities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

The concomitance of black-skinned student-populated colleges and universities on the African continent has created a quiescence regarding whiteness, racism, and disparity in African higher education. Resultantly, scant attention has been paid to the role and possibilities for Black populated colleges across the African continent to transform the political, social, and economic realities of African nation-states. In fact, the confluence of Western imperialism, slavery, genocide, and the contemporary frame of terrorism is highly correlated with the seeming permanence of war, oppression, and poverty across the African diaspora in general and on the African continent in specific.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why Africa's indigenous knowledge is not playing a more active and visible role in the knowledge economy and to the roles that academia and librarians must play for it to be so.

The paper's approach is to combine a literature review and discussion of the issues.

The importance of indigenous knowledge to development has been established over the years. Calls have been made for African universities to take indigenous knowledge into account in their teaching and research, and to view indigenous knowledge as valuable and as a way of addressing the view of Africa as a consumer of knowledge rather than a generator and contributor of knowledge. However, whilst there have been some initiatives in academia and in libraries to integrate indigenous knowledge into their activities, it has not been enough. The reasons are many and varied and stem largely from the globalizing and unifying nature of the world education system. However, this system does also offer an opportunity for African universities to distinguish themselves as African universities that have something different to offer the world.

The paper focuses on universities and libraries in Africa in general although Africa is a vast continent and there are differences in context.

Universities and libraries should look inward and find creative ways of integrating Western and indigenous knowledge systems in their teaching, research, engagement and information management.

The paper explores concrete ways that academia and libraries can address the matter of integrating indigenous knowledge into their activities to ensure recognition as being distinctively African.