Honorable minister, distinguished guests, university leaders, ecosystem partners, colleagues, ladies, and gentlemen:
Welcome once again to the Education Collaborative’s 2025 June Convening. It is always an honour to be here with you—not just to reflect, but to imagine what comes next. We are also excited to be hosting the annual convening outside of Ghana for the first time since we started. Rwanda is one of five countries that allows free travel to all Africans without prior approval—with Ghana becoming the fifth this year—and this openness makes convenings like this possible. To all our partners in Rwanda, we say thank you for being gracious hosts. Murakoze cyane.
As I was thinking of what to share today, the primary question on my mind was: how can we convince everyone here and watching us around the continent, that we are in the right place, at the right time, with the right people?
Eight years ago, we welcomed some 12 universities and organisations to our first June Convening on Ashesi’s campus in Berekuso. The feeling I had was one of hope and cautious optimism. We were embarking on an uncertain experiment, asking traditional competitors to think of how they could work together; making the case that collaboration was the only way we could effectively make higher education a force for growth in Africa.
Today, as we welcome 73 universities and organisations to this Convening, the feeling I have is different; it is a feeling of restlessness. Not restlessness borne out of impatience, but out of clarity. We now know that this vision of collective transformation is not only possible—it is already happening. This brings a new kind of responsibility, which is central to our convening theme this year: we must now work to ensure that every African student, no matter where they come from, can access a university system on the continent that sees them, serves them, and prepares them up to effectively lead.
This morning, we saw evidence of how collaboration can help us achieve this; a community of some 540 institutions, sharing openly and shaping new thinking for higher education; a network that now serves over 320,000 students, developing new pathways for careers, innovation, and leadership. Hubs in Eastern, Southern, and Western Africa, working to identify ways to transform policy and systems.
That’s not just scale. That’s momentum. Our greatest achievement is not expansion. It is the shift in mindset—from competition to collaboration, from isolation to openness, from thinking of students as outputs to understanding them as the very reason we exist. This mindset shift comes at a pivotal time.
In recent months, we’ve all seen the headlines: Visa bans. Migration policy rollbacks. Tightening borders.
Students from across Africa are increasingly finding it harder to migrate to destinations that once promised opportunity. This is not a crisis. It is a moment of reckoning — and a window of possibility. Because when international doors shrink, we are not left with nothing. We can build our own.
Can African universities become destinations of choice for African students? The answer is yes; but only if we center the student in everything we do. Not our institutions. Not our policies. Our students.
That means reimagining quality not just as academic prestige, but as relevance, equity, employability, and purpose. It means asking not just “what did this student learn?” but “who did they become?” And it means ensuring that African students can experience global-quality education — without needing to leave the continent to find it. That is the work we have started.
