Campus Africa
UNESCO’s Campus Africa Flagship is dedicated to building a vibrant and future-focused higher education sector across the continent. It focuses on developing integrated, inclusive, and high-quality tertiary education systems that reimagine African institutions as engines of innovation, sustainability, and social development.
This initiative aims to equip all students - particularly young women and marginalized communities - with the skills needed for meaningful transitions into the workforce, entrepreneurship and lifelong learning. This reflects a commitment to leveraging the potential of higher education to build resilient societies, drive sustainable growth, and achieve .
Higher education excellence, innovation capacities and skills supporting the Africa of tomorrow
Campus Africa supports a holistic, integrated approach to revitalizing the higher education sector, focusing on three key pillars and two transversal action areas cutting across fast growing sectors at the heart of Africa’s development vision: agriculture, renewable energies and technology.
Dedicated clusters or hubs of expertise contribute to new knowledge production and innovations that will shape the future of the continent.
Campus Africa areas of action
Support to higher education infrastructure and capacities for world-class research in green and digital transition growth sectors, notably in agriculture, renewable energies, and technologies, includes
- institutional capacities to lead, design, oversee, manage and disseminate cutting edge research portfolios,
- use technologies to advance research and development agendas,
- work with actors outside of academia on joint research through closer academia/industry linkages and multistakeholder collaboration.
Doctoral studies and scholarship opportunities are supported through funding, faculty and student exchanges and inter-university cooperation. Strategies for bridging digital divides ensure that doctoral and applied researchers, universities and research institutions can exchange knowledge, are connected through online networks, and can access repositories of good practice and information on potential research and funding partners.
Mobility between African universities, and with global institutions, are core elements of South-South-North capacity strengthening around research capacities.
Campus Africa supports the alignment of tertiary training for African youth with skills in demand in fast growing innovation sectors – including smart agriculture, renewable energies, technology integration, digital transformation and AI - while cultivating entrepreneurial solutions to local development challenges.
Targeted research, combined with more flexible, inclusive skills pathways and employability services, prepare young people for insertion into local economies and to shape the Africa of tomorrow.
Campus Africa also supports pioneering work to assess the long-term impacts of skilling on employment and entrepreneurship opportunities.
UNESCO works with global, regional and national organizations such as OBREAL (Observatory of the Relations between Europe and Latin America) and CAMES (African and Malagasy Council for Higher Education) to support African countries with no formal higher education quality assurance (QAA) mechanism, to strengthen cross-border recognition of qualifications and portability of credits, and to harmonize emerging accreditation systems with existing QAA.
Campus Africa also supports country efforts to increase student mobility through instruments such as the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education, and the Revised Convention on the Recognition of Studies, Certificates, Diplomas, Degrees and Other Academic Qualifications on Higher Education in African States (Addis Convention).
Recent transformations have boosted the importance of artificial intelligence, big data and Higher Education Management Information Systems, underlining the need to support higher education institutions in utilizing data for planning, financing and quality assurance purposes.
Through the , and cooperation with partner organizations such as the (IAU), support is available through Campus Africa to reinforce the collection and take up of comprehensive evidence, data and statistics on higher education for decision making.
