Q&A with Rose Dodd, Executive Director, The Education Collaborative

Co-Lab: What is the vision for the Education Collaborative and what is its origin story? How did that idea emerge, and what gap or opportunity were you seeking to address?

Rose Dodd: Ashesi University has a vision: “an Africa, transformed”. We are working towards this by educating the ethical, entrepreneurial leaders who will be able to advance this vision. Graduates who lead industry, economies, and nations. But Ashesi is only one institution, on a continent with millions of young college-age students. Currently, the student population at Ashesi is about 1,500. To effectively achieve the goal of educating ethical, entrepreneurial leaders in such a context, we needed to think of a more sustainable, enduring way to scale and reach the needed critical mass of young people.

Ashesi was also regularly having conversations with colleagues in other African universities around how we sustainably deliver the kind of education Africa’s future demands. These conversations revealed a shared ambition, and a persistent gap. Institutions were learning in parallel, not together. It became clear that the opportunity for impact did not lie in any single university scaling alone, but in what could be achieved if institutions combined their collective human capital, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge.

The Education Collaborative emerged from this insight. It brings together higher education institutions across Africa that commit to a shared purpose: ensuring that graduates leave university prepared to build businesses, lead economies, and create opportunity; so that Africa’s rapidly expanding youthful population becomes a lasting demographic advantage.

Co-Lab: And what are some of the most significant outcomes that you have seen through this collaborative model so far?

RD: I believe we should lead with the ultimate outcome: stronger student outcomes. We have contributed to improved outcomes for more than 420,000 students across Africa, through curriculum reform, redesigned career services, strengthened entrepreneurship training, and the intentional integration of ethics into teaching and leadership development.

This impact has been delivered through a network of 57 committed member institutions, while directly engaging leadership, faculty, and professional teams from nearly 500 African higher education institutions.

Yet, the biggest accomplishment, to me, is that we have been able to set a significantly effective example of how universities can shift from a mode of competition to one of collaboration. All of our members are autonomous organizations yet have become incredibly committed to growing and strengthening this collective. This has sometimes required them to prioritize goals that they individually would not have pursued. This cultural shift is incredibly powerful.

Co-Lab: Can you speak about the core principles that shaped the collaborative design and evolution? What makes the model effective in practice, particularly across those diverse institutions you have.

RD: The Education Collaborative’s governance structure has evolved through practice. Early on, the network learned that scale and trust cannot be achieved through centralized control, nor through loose affiliation. What was required was a system that protected institutional autonomy while enabling collective decision making. While the Education Collaborative’s central leadership team is convened and currently hosted by Ashesi University, decision-making authority rests with participating institutions to ensure shared legitimacy and long-term commitment.

Governance is structured through regional hubs in West, East, and Southern Africa, reflecting the varying regulatory and operational realities of higher education institutions in these regions. Each hub is led by rotating strategy and technical committees composed of senior leaders from member institutions, ensuring that priorities are set by peers with direct institutional responsibility. These hubs connect directly to the Collaborative’s central leadership, creating a clear line between local decision-making and continental coordination. It facilitates alignment across regions, supports shared strategy development, and ensures consistency in quality, ethics, and outcomes across the network. Importantly, this team also leads fundraising and financial administration, allowing member institutions to focus more on implementation and less on overhead. Each member university also has designated operational representatives and teams, keeping the Collaborative embedded in institutional life rather than as a detached secretariat.

This separation of roles (member-led governance paired with centrally supported operations) has enabled the Collaborative to scale responsibly. Universities retain autonomy and ownership, while benefiting from shared infrastructure that strengthens sustainability and long-term impact.

We have our four focal areas of employability and career services development, entrepreneurship ecosystems development, faculty development and research, and ethics and leadership; trending areas in higher education globally that common starting point for most institutional engagements. Members however leverage the trust and connection in the network to engage on any and all aspects on university teaching, learning, management and practices. They share and learn around admissions best practices or even for branding and marketing. They also connect things like setting up your diversity office or improved financial management and fundraising. With the competitive barriers down, institutions openly share and learn from each other. And those really are the main principles of the Collaborative.

Co-Lab: And along the way, you must have encountered some challenges as you built the Education Collaborative. What are some of the foundations that you needed to make as a network grow and some lessons that you’ve learned along the way.

RD: One of the key things we have done, is to redefine what meaningful participation looks like in a network like this. The Education Collaborative does not charge a membership fee by design. We understand that paying a membership fee does not necessarily guarantee engagement, and engagement is the foundation of collective impact.

Instead, as a result, membership is sustained through participation. We use clear metrics and indicators to assess how institutions engage across leadership, faculty, and programming. Each year, institutions conduct self-assessments alongside peer review, and together we determine whether to deepen, adjust, or in some cases reconsider membership. Early on, this approach took time to land, as institutions often assumed engagement was measured in event attendance rather than strategic integration.

A second challenge was balancing institutional priorities with collective goals. While the Collaborative has a shared vision and network-wide objectives shaped through regional hubs, every institution operates within its own strategic planning and goals. It can be challenging to bridge the two, and university leaders themselves determine they do so.

However, we are seeing institutions increasingly incorporate network priorities into their own strategic reviews, creating alignment without sacrificing autonomy. Over time, institutions began to see that meaningful engagement works best when it aligns with their own priorities. Rather than adding work, participation in the Collaborative became a way to improve efficiency, strengthen outcomes, and accelerate learning by integrating network insights into everyday institutional practice; and connecting on the key trending focal areas in higher education.

Co-Lab: What has created trust and alignment and sustained engagement across institutions? What are some additional things that you have seen that have allowed institutions to open up and become long term partners?

RD: It took us a bit of time to build trust among institutions. Ashesi University, which convened the network, led by example. Ashesi made its own practices and lessons available as an invitation to learn together. A small group of institutions was willing to do the same, and this creating a critical mass of openness. And when institutions implement with the intention of teaching others, they design more deliberately and learn faster. It’s the protégé effect in action. As a result, the act of sharing became a catalyst for internal improvement. Institutions strengthened their own practices precisely because they were reporting on outcomes and making them visible to peers.

Over time, we have created a culture of reciprocity: institutions recognized that what they held as expertise was matched by what others could offer in return. The Collaborative’s role has been to remain administratively neutral, holding the standards for quality of the network, and ensuring that institutions can engage openly, knowing there is transparency and protection.

Co-Lab: What are some trends or shifts in African higher education that are most shaping your work right now? What is emerging that gives you optimism about the future of the sector?

RD: Right now its really about AI integration into the organization as a whole. Individuals are using artificial intelligence of course, but when you think institutionally: how can higher education institutions capture it and really integrate it? That's one of the key trends currently shaping our work.

We recently completed a study in partnership with the Qatar Foundation’s World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), trying to understand how African institutions are incorporating and planning for AI adoption. It is clear that AI integration is going to bring a new wave of innovation and opportunities if African higher education institutions effectively plan for it. The Education Collaborative is engaged in this effort, as a result. We are planning on the next phase, which would engage a few universities who are committing to integrate AI over the next two years to engage through mentorship and training to achieve their goals, and in turn lead their peers to achieve same. 

Another trend is employability and work readiness of graduates. The metrics around it and the continuous learning on the best way to build the skills of the young people that join higher education institutions. We've been working very much around that; building tools and platforms for sharing, and communities of practice.

For institutions that are public universities, very large institutions, and yet have very limited resourcing, what does that look like? How does transformation look in contexts like this? Public universities in the network are leading the effort to figure out what works best for employability and entrepreneurship development systems for their students in their context for both in and out of the classroom.

These are continuously trending, and underlying all that is ethical leadership, particularly in the context of Africa. We engage with senior institutional executive and student leaders, around building an ethical culture. So that ethical leadership is part of what you do and who you are. We have programs that engage student leaders to leverage their position to influence their peers, as well as to work together with university leadership.

The African Union’s education strategy also explicitly seeks to enhance the mobility of students and academic staff among African universities to strengthen teaching and collaborative research across the continent. This is part of a broader effort to improve mobility on the continent generally, and recognition that universities could be central to this effort. As a result networks like the Education Collaborative could also set a strong example here and help advance learning in this space. What could we create by way of shared programs, student and faculty exchanges, or even shared infrastructure for learning that could boost mobility? Those are efforts we will be committing to in the years ahead as well.

Co-Lab: If a university leader or a policymaker were reading this interview, what are the key takeaways that could apply in their daily strategic decision making?

RD: Collaboration has always been important, but as higher education demand surges in Africa, right now it is very critical that institutions build that capability, and more so on the continent, in a context where resources are scarce, foreign borders are tightening, and youthful population is expanding. Universities must adjust and learn quickly, and if you are a university leader, there is no better way to do this than to learn from your peers and to adapt tactics and models that have been proven to work in contexts that are similar to yours. This saves you a lot of time, money, and effort.

As a university on the continent of Africa, it is very important to note that, institutions need to figure out how to have one voice. Data is a very big part of developing one voice. And one voice is crucial for influencing the implementation of higher education policy. Say, you are an institution in Africa that is excellent in an area of research, for example, it is much easier to make the case for that approach if other institutions in Africa successfully adopt it and can show proof of impact of that approach in multiple African contexts. 

This is why sharing is important for developing one voice. University leaders have a real opportunity to advance higher education in Africa, and the continent’s thought leadership, even as all these shifts happen around the world. There has been no better time to act on collaboration, and to open up your institution to others for shared learning.

Historically, when communities faced existential threats, they responded by forming alliances, building villages, and creating systems of mutual responsibility. Trust, vulnerability, and interdependence were not optional they were survival tools. Today, African higher education systems face their own existential pressures: widening access gaps, funding shortfalls, shifting migration patterns, and intensifying global competition. The dominant response has been institutional self-preservation retreating inward, prioritizing autonomy, rankings, and fragmented strategies.