In a recent Future Learning Design podcast conversation, hosted by Tim Logan,  Partner at Good Impact Labs, Rose A. Dodd, Executive Director, The Education Collaborative, shares how The Education Collaborative is adopting a shared accountability approach to ensure that graduates from one university are as strong as those from the other, towards improved higher education outcomes in Africa. In an industry that has long been known to be highly competitive, The Education Collaborative’s operations take a collaborative approach to convene institutions, clustered in East, West, Central, North, and Southern Africa, who are uncompromising in their pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, and innovation, and who become magnets that attract and retain Africa’s best and brightest talent on the continent.  

Listen to the full episode here.

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
There’s a powerful idea that Dr George Mugabe, Director of The Education Collaborative’s East Africa Hub, shares: that transforming Africa begins with transforming its universities. Reflecting on this quote, would you say that’s part of the work you are doing?  
 
Rose Dodd: 
Yes, is the quick answer. It is true that transforming Africa largely begins with transforming the universities. The last time I checked, Africa has about 1,600 tertiary institutions, and enrolment in tertiary education is below 10%. In other parts of the world, it is over 30%. This means higher education on the continent is a significant gateway into the formal workforce.  

A person sitting in a university classroom today is very likely to go into management, become a leader, start a business that employs people, or lead research or policy, or engage in government. Because enrollment is so small, this group [sitting in university classrooms] is a critical few – and in order for industry and economies to transform, this group must be deliberately developed for that future. 

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
Can you introduce The Education Collaborative and why you chose collaboration over competition? 

Rose Dodd: 
The Education Collaborative is a network of higher education institutions in Africa that are committed to ensuring that the graduates who come through their gates get into the workforce – not only to get jobs, but also to create jobs, to lead industry, and to lead economies. 

It is a network that collectively says: we want to capture what is working well within our walls, and we want to openly share it with others so they can replicate it; we want to improve ourselves through learning, we want to gather evidence of the work we are doing to show that it works for our context, and then communicate what is really working for Africa, within Africa. 

Ultimately, this network is saying that the graduate who comes out of our gates should be ready to transform the continent, and we want to hold each other accountable for it. We have been doing this since 2017, when Ashesi University convened the first set of universities. 

Why collaboration? Higher education has been defined by competition. Universities have grown to compete for what we call a limited number of qualified candidates. But that is not really the case. There is a growing population of young people entering higher education in Africa. Higher education is not just universities – it includes Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions and teacher training colleges.  

The sense of competition is more in our minds than it is in reality. University classrooms across the continent are already bursting at seams with the influx of young people. So, collaboration was really a no-brainer. Let’s work together, because we are all essentially trying to achieve the same thing: preparing graduates for the world of work. 

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
That idea of shared responsibility feels quite transformative. How do you build the trust required for that level of collaboration? 

Rose Dodd:  
Yes, it is transformative. One concept that has been helpful is what I think of as inter-organizational psychological safety. Psychological safety has been studied within teams – how people feel safe to say, “I don’t know,” or “I need help,” or “This is what I am good at.” The question for us was: how do we create that across organizations? 

Organizations are made up of people, so we started there. Leaders are critical, but they also operate within constraints – boards, strategic plans, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and limited terms. 

When you are asking a leader to commit time and effort to collaboration, you must recognize those constraints. It cannot feel like an additional burden. It has to align with what they are already trying to achieve. At The Education Collaborative, we are very deliberate about balancing institutional autonomy with collective goals. 

Over time, institutional goals begin to align with the group’s goals. When institutions begin their own strategic planning, they start to ask: what does partnership mean in the context of [The Education Collaborative] this network?  

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
What role does openness play in making collaboration work? 

Rose Dodd: 
One of the values we hold dear at The Education Collaborative is learning, and an important one is openness. Institutions commit to being open and honest about what they are going through – what is working and what is not. We were able to achieve that because we realized we have similar challenges across different campuses. We have similar stakeholders, similar pressures, similar goals. 

When The Education Collaborative started in 2017, Ashesi University set the tone for engagement by sharing openly – sharing admissions processes and blueprints, how marketing and branding are done, as well as approaches to leadership education. 

Other institutions saw that and said, “You mean you are okay with us replicating this?” 

And the answer was yes. Because it is not about competition – it is about improving outcomes. We have seen faculty visit each other’s classrooms, adopt aspects of teaching, and adapt them to their own contexts. There’s no added layer of bureaucracy to adopt aspects of another faculty’s teaching and that flexibility is a critical part of The Education Collaborative’s network. 

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
Africa is a large and very diverse continent, with different regional and linguistic dynamics.  How do you work with that diversity? How do you ensure that what works in one place is appropriately adapted to another? 

Rose Dodd: 
Africa is large and diverse, but also similar in many ways. We use a regional hub model to reflect that. Regions like West Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa have their own regulatory frameworks and structures. 

When you come to the sub-regional level – West Africa has the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), East Africa has the East African Community (EAC), and Southern Africa has Southern African Development Community (SADC) – there are also regional higher education frameworks, standards, and accreditation systems. So it makes sense for universities within a sub-region to gather around those structures, because it allows learning and adaptation to move faster. 

If you are applying something in Kenya that you learned in Uganda, it is more likely to fit within the East African framework than if you were trying to transfer it across a much more distant regulatory and cultural setting. We also use the regional model for practical reasons. It is simply easier and more affordable for institutions to connect within their region to travel from Ghana to Nigeria, for example, or from Botswana to Namibia than across the continent. 

So while an institution can still learn from another further away, we first encourage regional connections. And we have built that into our governance structure. Alongside my office, which you could think of as the continental secretariat, there are regional secretariats and regional governance teams made up of senior university leaders—vice-chancellors, deans, and Chief Operating Officers (COOs). 

That regional governance structure helps determine priorities for each region. Should East Africa focus on research? Admissions? Employability? Entrepreneurship? Those priorities are determined annually, and they then guide the region’s funding, programming, and contribution to the broader network. 

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
Has there been any engagement within The Education Collaborative to build stronger links to the K–12 space? 

Rose Dodd: 
Yes, definitely. It has come up, and a number of our programs are open to K–12 as well. For example, engagements focused on employability preparation and values-driven leadership.  

Another area where we are especially intentional is with tertiary institutions that train teachers for pre-tertiary education. That is one of the strongest points of connection between K–12 and higher education, because the teachers who go into schools, whether public or private, are trained through a tertiary system. 

So the question becomes: how do we strengthen that training system so that there is a stronger bridge between students leaving K–12 and entering university or even students leaving K–12 and entering the world ready to be productive citizens, whether or not they go on to university? 

We are also seeing strong uptake of some of our ethical leadership work at the K–12 level through our Giving Voice to Values (GVV) Africa course. That is because it is focused not just on having values, but on building the skill – the muscle – for ethical action. You may know your values, but how do you actually act on them, especially in environments where doing the right thing may not be the easiest thing?  

Building an ethical culture takes time, but tools like GVV Africa enable it.  

Future Learning Design Podcast: 
The Education Collaborative has come a long way, from 2017, growing to 61 member institutions this year. What does the future look like for the Education Collaborative? 

Rose Dodd: 
It’s been almost 10 years since we started engaging institutions at The Education Collaborative. A small number of institutions came together. The first phase was foundational – set up to be owned by institutions in the network, and so it does not feel like Rose and her team are driving it. Our operational structure is designed to ensure institutional ownership.  

Then we moved into the phase where we had to determine what it means to be a member, how we scale without diluting the value members get from the network. That’s what we are rounding up in phase two. In phase three, building on all of that is how do we begin to scale our influence. We are beginning to see transformation in institutions, leaders, faculty, staff, strategic plans that are being adapted, in institutions that can better track graduate outcomes. How do we package all that we are learning globally to share what it means to do higher education in Africa. What matters in higher education in Africa and what do we have to say about what matters in higher education in Africa. How do we build shared measurement systems and metrics. If one institution says its employability rate is 70%, does it mean the same thing for another institution? We have built the foundations and energy to drive this phase.    

As an enabler, you have to be comfortable stepping back. The goal is that the work continues, and the impact continues, even without you. 

Future Learning Design Podcast:  
On a personal level, Rose, what drives your commitment to this work? 

Rose Dodd: 
For me, it’s seeing the amount of leverage the African continent can have that we have not fully realized how to bring it together to make a case. When you go to the negotiation table without having figured out your story, there is no negotiation. You are just going to accept what’s put on the table. I am passionate about the continent, but also about the role that the people who shape others will have. University leaders, staff, and faculty have a significant influence on young people’s development. I am an African first, then a Ghanaian, and then a global citizen. This work is very important to me.