For many people, Harvard, where I currently teach, is the center of higher education in the world. Well, if wealth and prestige are the measuring sticks, this is probably true. However, if we use a different measure — if we do not consider reputation formed in the past, but rather the potential to impact the future — it is not too much of a stretch to see the center of the world of higher education as located in Mauritius. If this seems to be an overstatement, remember this: Mauritius has been home to the African Leadership College (ALC) since 2015, an institution whose mission is to prepare ethical and entrepreneurial leaders for Africa and, even more, to change the way we think about colleges and universities.
The basic practices in higher education go back as far as medieval Europe. To receive an advanced education, students needed to travel to a university with buildings and a library and scholars who could pass on knowledge. Times have changed. As Fred Swaniker, the founder of ALC and of the African Leadership Group, likes to say, “students now have access to more information on their phones than that which existed in any university library half a century ago”. Traditional higher education has yet to adapt to this new, more accessible, yet more complicated world of almost limitless information. It is one of the slowest of all industries to change.
We also know today from many behavioral studies that people learn best not by listening, but by doing, not by sitting in a classroom, but by creating things and interacting with others and attempting difficult tasks. Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard, among others, has shown through research tat the lecture is a highly ineffective method of teaching: it provides the teacher with the illusion of teaching and the learner with the illusion of learning without fully accomplishing either. Yet, most colleges and universities continue to rely heavily on professors lecturing and students listening while neglecting experiential learning. Never forget: children learn to walk and to speak without taking a class. Then, they enter into school systems around the world and become trained to be passive listeners. ALC’s goal is to reignite the innate human capacity to learn.
The African Leadership College has developed a new learning model designed for the contemporary world. That model rests on three essential pillars:
(1) Access: Africa has the youngest population in the world with a median age of 19.7 years for a population of 1.2 billion people, yet its students have the least access to higher education. One of the main barriers is cost since a traditional education is expensive to produce. ALC is changing its educational model so that it costs less, allowing it to reduce tuition fees and reach more students from across the continent. Thanks to the generosity of the MasterCard Foundation and other donors, it also provides scholarships to wonderful students who simply can’t afford college.
(2) Missions, not majors: Most colleges and universities across the world ask students to organize their education around a major in a subject like economics or biology. However, the challenges and opportunities they will face after graduation are not organized into discrete subjects; they require a creative, interdisciplinary approach. Rather than declaring a major, students at ALC will declare a mission like conservation, urbanization, or women’s empowerment and organize their education around the goal of pursuing it.
(3) Learning by doing: Students at ALC will take classes both on campus and online, taught by faculty in Mauritius and around the world. But they will also engage with the world through internships and with each other through group projects and challenges. ALC is above all else an experiential college, with an education built not around faculty, but around the individual student.
This educational model is designed not just to prepare students to be lifelong learners — though that goal is important — but to prepare them for jobs. Employers everywhere say they want graduates with an entrepreneurial mindset and with real-world experience, and those are the things that ALC aims to provide.
The journey of ALC students will begin on the Mauritius campus, where they will, through immersion in the leadership core, work on skills ranging from writing and quantitative thinking to empathy and creativity. Then, they will have the option of remaining in Mauritius to continue their studies or moving to one of the “hubs” that are being established throughout Africa. Once ALC has completed the accreditation process for this new model and students have started engaging in it, they will be able to access a number of hubs that have already been established by ALC’s sister organization, the African Leadership University in Rwanda. The first, in Kampala and Kigali, are up and running and provide a place for students to access reliable internet, to work with one another on entrepreneurial projects, to meet with visiting faculty and practitioners, and to fi nd internships. The third was launched recently in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley where 25 students spent over a month engaging with tech and entrepreneurship leaders and academics from Silicon Valley.
The goal over time is to have three cohorts of students from around the continent spend time on the Mauritius campus each year — one in each of ALC’s three terms. It is also to bring students from other colleges and universities and visiting scholars to the campus, making Mauritius an important stopping point for the brightest minds from around the world.
I have been working with ALC as an advisor for more than a year and a half, after decades spent as a student, faculty member, dean, and president at some of the best-known institutions in the United States. I can say without hesitation that the African Leadership College has the potential to have more impact than anything else on which I’ve worked in my career. Its goals are ambitious, maybe even audacious, but they are the right goals for Africa and for this moment in the evolution of higher education.
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of visiting Mauritius, where I saw both the beauty of the island and its aspirations to be an intellectual, technological, and economic leader in the region. I also met the students and staff at ALC, whose drive to improve the lives of those around them was as breathtaking as the Mauritian landscape. It is clear to me that the work being done on that campus located at the Beau Plan smart city, has the potential to advance the most important goals of the country by which it is hosted. I look forward to seeing how the college and the island evolve together.
August 2022