The implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) presents a unique opportunity to reposition higher education and scientific research as central pillars of Africa’s socio-economic transformation. While AfCFTA is primarily an economic framework aimed at boosting intra-African trade and integration, its ripple effects on education – particularly higher education – are substantial, creating both opportunities and challenges.

Opportunities for Higher Education Under AfCFTA

AfCFTA encourages increased academic mobility across the continent, facilitating the freer movement of students, faculty, and researchers. This opens new avenues for regional diversity in African universities through greater intra-African student enrollment, and cross-border collaboration on large-scale, multi-country research and innovation projects. It also encourages the harmonization of academic standards, driven by the growing importance of instruments like the African Qualifications Framework (ACQF) and African Quality Rating Mechanism (AQRM).

In tandem, universities are being called upon to align curricula with the skills demands of the AfCFTA-driven labor market, including competencies in entrepreneurship, trade law, digital technologies, and intercultural communication. Joint degree programs, faculty exchanges, and collaborative teaching models can also promote continental integration and institutional partnerships. This is in addition to embracing the off-campus training and teaching model within the industry and evaluating its effectiveness.

Challenges to Effective Integration

Despite these promising developments, the road to full realization of AfCFTA’s potential in higher education has structural barriers, key among them being the regulatory divergence among member states in accreditation, quality assurance, and recognition of qualifications. Infrastructure and funding gaps, particularly for under-resourced institutions, limit their ability to fully participate. Language and cultural barriers also complicate academic harmonization and student/faculty mobility. There is also the risk of brain drain, with skilled academics and students gravitating toward better-resourced universities, potentially leaving behind a gap in capacity in lower-income countries.

To mitigate these challenges, there is an urgent need to develop continental frameworks for mutual recognition of academic and professional qualifications, supported by policy alignment across education ministries. This should go together with investments in digital learning platforms, entrepreneurship hubs, and public-private partnerships that align educational offerings with AfCFTA’s economic goals.

Making Research More Valuable, Transcending Education Sub-Sectors, and Aligned with Continental Priorities

AfCFTA can catalyze a shift in African universities toward applied, policy-relevant, and interdisciplinary research. There is growing demand for homegrown knowledge in areas such as regional trade and economic integration, industrialization and entrepreneurship, digital and green transitions, and sustainable development.

Such a shift would allow universities to move beyond theoretical output toward research that directly informs policy and development programming. There are also opportunities to pool resources, create regional innovation platforms, and increase support from pan-African bodies like the African Union, African Academy of Sciences, and AfDB.

Evidence from research outputs in higher education institutions need to feed into the decision making at the other sub-sectors of Africa’s education. This promotes the relevance of such evidence. To strengthen this connection, strategies need to be put in place that connects university leaders with those of TVET, secondary, primary, and early childhood education sub-sectors to get a better understanding of their needs and therefore focus the research accordingly.

Facilitating Skills Mobility Across the Continent and the Imperative for Sustainable and Innovative Financing

Skills mobility is a critical pillar of AfCFTA. With harmonized qualifications and more open borders, higher education institutions must ensure graduates are equipped with transferable, cross-border competencies such as digital literacy, multilingualism, intercultural fluency and regional labor market knowledge. This could unlock faculty and researcher mobility, joint academic appointments, and continental talent pipelines in priority sectors such as health, digital finance, and climate technology. However, disparities in education systems and institutional capacity must be addressed to ensure mobility is equitable and does not exacerbate inequality across regions.

Sustainable financing remains a key barrier – and a major enabler – of higher education transformation. AfCFTA opens new avenues for innovative financing, including trade-related funding streams, diaspora and private sector investments, cross-border public-private partnerships, and blended financing models that combine government, business, and development finance. Regional innovation funds and trade-linked scholarships can help expand access and equity, particularly for rural and under-resourced institutions. Universities may also benefit from tapping into multilateral development banks (e.g., AfDB) and trade facilitation funds to support programs in research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. However, care must be taken to avoid overreliance on donor-driven agendas, ensuring funding aligns with national and local priorities.

AfCFTA presents a historic opportunity to reposition African higher education: to become more innovative, better funded, more responsive to labor market needs, and more deeply integrated across borders. This sub-theme will explore how to translate these opportunities into tangible action – through contextualized experiences, partnerships, and scalable practices – to ensure that Africa’s higher education systems become true engines of economic transformation and inclusive development.