Competition has long shaped the higher education landscape. Universities compete for students, funding, rankings, and research opportunities. Increasingly, however, many of Africa’s most promising solutions are emerging not through competition, but through collaboration. 

The University of Cape Town (UCT) has lived this firsthand through its engagement with The Education Collaborative. Working alongside fellow member institutions across East, West, and Southern Africa, UCT shares expertise, learns from peers, and takes part in a growing movement of universities committed to strengthening graduate employability across the continent. 

Stafford Bormester, Director of Career Services at UCT, felt that collaborative spirit from the moment he got involved.  

“It was an unexpected experience to think that there is such an organization looking to bring the entire sector together,” he reflects. “Higher education, especially in South Africa, tends to be quite competitive. So this concept of collaboration has been quite an interesting and refreshing experience.” 

His experience points to a growing wave of collaboration sweeping across The Education Collaborative’s network, where member universities are turning to one another increasingly, looking for practical answers to challenges they all share. Instead of working alone, institutions are exchanging ideas, trying out approaches in different settings, and building stronger systems together to prepare students for a world of work that keeps shifting.

Mentorship beyond the Workshop 

One of the clearest examples of this collaboration came during The Education Collaborative’s 2025 Career Strategy Workshop, which brought together career services leaders and university representatives from across Africa to rethink how institutions prepare students for work and entrepreneurship. 

Workshops like this usually end the way they begin: with good intentions and a folder of notes nobody quite gets back to. This one was different. For the first time, it paired career services professionals with participating universities as ongoing mentors, people who would still be checking in months after everyone had flown home.  

 Bormester was paired with Gulu University in Uganda. He didn’t arrive with ready-made answers. The early conversations centered instead on listening: understanding what Gulu wanted to build, the barriers standing in its way, and what a realistic first step could look like. 

“Success begins with bringing decision-makers on board,” he says. “The next stage is implementing career services as a vital student service, free from bureaucratic barriers.” 

That became the shape of the mentorship: helping the university build real institutional buy-in for career development, put sustainable structures in place, and set a one-year strategic plan with goals modest enough to be met. 

One participant reflected: “We left with an action plan, and with someone to check in with, who’ll help us stay on track.”  It captures exactly the type of sustained engagement The Education Collaborative hopes to foster: universities learning with one another rather than simply learning from one another. 

From strategy to systems change 

Bormester’s involvement progressed beyond mentoring Gulu University. He now mentors two more institutions, Embu University in Kenya and the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Tanzania, through The Education Collaborative’s Systems Change Program – Employability (SCP-E), an 18-month effort focused on rebuilding the systems behind graduate employability. 

The SCP-E focuses less on individual activities and more on institutional systems. Universities identify employability champions who get coaching and technical support as they work out what is actually broken and fix it: connecting academic learning, employer relationships, career development, and entrepreneurship into something that functions as one system instead of four separate offices. 

Eighteen months is long enough for a mentorship to stop feeling like an assignment and start feeling like a working relationship. Mentors become people the universities actually call when a plan needs adjusting, sounding boards instead of consultants who disappear once the report is filed. 

Bormester sees the program’s greatest strength in how much weight it gives to implementation. 

“The implementation phase has been particularly valuable,” he says. “It doesn’t stop at developing a strategy. It walks alongside institutions as they begin putting those plans into practice. That’s where you really begin to understand the realities each university is working through.” 

Learning goes both ways 

It would be easy to assume that experienced universities simply transfer knowledge to others. Bormester insists the reality is very different. 

Throughout his engagement with The Education Collaborative, he has found himself learning as much from colleagues across Africa as he has shared. 

An example he points to is from Pan-Atlantic University in Nigeria, where entrepreneurship is intentionally embedded throughout the student experience. Rather than existing as a standalone program, entrepreneurial thinking forms part of every student’s educational journey. 

The approach challenged some of UCT’s own thinking and sparked conversations about how entrepreneurship could become more deeply integrated into its curriculum. 

“We all have similar challenges,” Bormester says. “Through these engagements I’ve come to appreciate the depth of innovation happening across African universities and the opportunities we have to learn from one another.” 

That spirit of exchange has reshaped his understanding of mentorship itself. 

“I’ve probably learned more from the mentees than I’ve shared,” he reflects. “They’re professionals in their own right. The mentorship pool is another opportunity to grow in my own experience while giving back.” 

It is a useful reminder that expertise in African higher education is not concentrated in one place waiting to be exported. It is spread out across the continent, and organizations like The Education Collaborative exist mainly to let that knowledge circulate, adapt, and grow.

Why this shared vision for African Higher Education matters to UCT specifically 

UCT’s Vision 2030 calls for deeper engagement across the continent, and Bormester sees The Education Collaborative as one of the more concrete ways of acting on that. 

“We’re increasingly applying our minds and our strategies to ensure that we are relevant to Africa. We’re engaging more purposefully with our African counterparts and stakeholders, and The Education Collaborative has come at an opportune time to help us achieve that objective.” 

His involvement now goes beyond individual mentorships. Bormester sits on the Technical Committee of The Education Collaborative’s Southern Africa Hub, helping shape regional activities while drawing on lessons already learned in the East and West Africa Hubs. 

“I’m encouraged that more institutions are coming on board. We’re building on the success we’ve seen in East and West Africa, and we’d like Southern Africa to make its own contribution as well.” 

Learning together, not just from each other  

The Collaborative is built on a simple idea: universities learn more when they learn together. A university in Cape Town is trading notes with universities in Kampala, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos, and everyone involved is walking away better equipped than they started. 

UCT’s collaboration with fellow African universities, is a reminder that the best solutions in African higher education are not being invented in isolation. They are being worked out together, one honest conversation at a time, by people who would rather learn from each other than compete.