Events

African Higher Education Centers of Excellence: A Decade of Impact, Innovation, and Excellence

April 7-9, 2025
Labadi Beach Hotel, Accra, Ghana

Celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Africa's Higher Education Centers of Excellence

Objectives

The Africa’s Higher Education Centers of Excellence (ACEs), together with their partners, will get together to celebrate their 10th Anniversary in a high-level forum. Specifically, this grand event aims to: 

  • Celebrate a decade of achievements, highlighting key successes, research breakthroughs, and innovations, and showcasing data-driven insights on how the ACEs, as catalysts, have strengthened higher education institutions, regional collaboration, and industry linkages and produced meaningful impact to communities. 
  • Share best practices and reflect on lessons learned, engaging stakeholders in discussing remaining challenges and opportunities for improvement based on the ACE experience. 
  • Discuss sustainability strategies, exploring policy frameworks, institutional reforms, and financing modalities to sustain and expand ACE achievements and impact. 
  • Engage development partners and chart the future, through dialogue with governments, industry leaders, and international partners, soliciting their continued support, and discussing opportunities for future collaboration in shaping and producing the next generation of African researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs across the continent to accelerate its development and economic transformation. 

Organizers

The event is co-organized by the Association of African Universities (AAU) and the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), with the support of the World Bank and the French Development Agency (AFD). 

Participants

Over 500 key stakeholders from African governments, higher education institutions including the ACEs, industry, development agencies, civil society, and the media. 

The Africa’s Higher Education Centers of Excellence (ACE) program is the first large scale regional program funded by the World Bank in the higher education sector in Africa. Through a series of three projects - ACE1 (2014-2020); ACE2 (2016 to date); and ACE Impact (2019 to date)— the program has supported competitively selected ACEs with specializations in regional development priority areas to deliver high-quality postgraduate training, skills-upgrading for professionals, applied research, entrepreneurship and innovation in priority sectors such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), agriculture, health, environment, and education. Across these projects, the World Bank has committed a total of US$657 million in support to participating governments, with an additional co-financing of US$72 million equivalent from the French Development Agency (AFD) for the ACE Impact project.  

In total, the ACE Program has supported some 80 centers in more than 50 universities across 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. By leveraging economies of scale, with the support of regional bodies and governments of hosting countries, through enhancing teaching/research facilities, sharing good practices in teaching and learning, promoting cross-border collaboration and research networks, as well as collectively addressing the needs of higher-level skills and research/innovation for the priority sectors, these ACEs have achieved remarkable results. They significantly expanded the capacity of postgraduate training with an enrollment of more than 90,000 students (including over 7,650 PhDs and 30,200 Masters), over 32% of whom are female. They increased research output with over 10,350 publications, increased sustainability with self-generated over US$183 million external revenues, improved linkage with industries with more than 18,000 internships, and enhanced academic quality with 600 programs nationally accredited and over 130 programs internationally accredited. Building on this success, the ACE Program is working with partners and mobilizing resources with a focus more on sharing best practices, strengthening further institutional capacities, fostering entrepreneurship, innovation and technology transfer, and promoting further in-country and cross-border collaborations, in priority sector areas, for greater impact.

LEARN MORE

Watch on YouTube

ACE@10 Live Stream: Celebrating a Decade of Impact, Innovation, and Excellence

ASSOCIATION OF AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES

INTER-UNIVERSITY COUNCIL FOR EAST AFRICA

WORLD BANK

WORLD BANK

RELATED