 Goed afternoon colleagues, partners, participants en welkom til the final session of our University of Pretoria Africa Week ons gehoost met de sustainable development solutions network. Over the past two days we've had compelling dialogue around reimagining our universities, making a difference and measuring impact. Now we're coming to the tough stuff, how do we turn exciting thoughts and ideas into practice? En om dit toe te doen, hebden we een serie van leedership conversaties gehaald om ons te helpen op het reis te doen. We starten met het welkom video van prof Shayk Mbow, ons director van Futur Afrika, waar we nu siten. This flows into a leedership dialogue with our panel of experts, Ms. Mariat Cortesburg, Prof. Lobode Popula en Ms. Caroline Makasa. I'll introduce them more formally at the start of the dialogue. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs will join us in the course of our conversation and you will share some of these reflections. Finally, our session along with the broader Africa Week series of events will then be closed by our own Vice Chancellor, Prof. Tawana Koupe. So with a full hour ahead, let's get stuck into our meeting and I'll introduce Prof. Shayk Mbow, who will be on video to give him a welcome to everybody. He's the director of Futur Africa and through his professional career has been deeply involved in sustainable development. He's worked in Africa and the United States and has expertise in sustainability transformation and climate change. Now, a characteristic of Shayk is that he inherently believes that through research and education, Africa has the profound potential to build capability and create the solutions we need for our transformation as a continent. Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome to Futur Africa Institute. Thank you VC for making this happen and to meet with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs to the SDSN and the Vice Chancellor and our colleagues from the SDG Centre for Africa. We are interested in this discussion just for three main points. One is discussing with SDGs and the transformation that Africa needs. That leads to an important discussion that we need to have is the set of partnership we need to establish to make that transformation happen. Lastly, how we at Futur Africa, we contribute to that transformation and make sure that the SDGs are happening and implemented in Africa in a proper manner. To the first point, when we talk about transformation at Futur Africa, we think of deep and rapid transformation for Africa. Deep and rapid transformation just because we only have nine years to go and the montane to claim is so high. If you take the dashboard of SDSN, Africa is lagging behind, not only in the achievement of information that are needed for the SDGs but also to the space of implementation of those SDGs. Definitely the university and academia and the research should do something to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. Transformation is not always transactional. It's a shift in a mindset of communities of our society and that require a number of new things, new rational, new concept, new governance structure, new funding and all those areas are knowledge intensive. We need to question what science says about it. But at the same time, we also have to be realistic that academia is not the stronghold of all knowledge that exists into society. There are so many important information that we need to grasp on society and reverse the relationship that the university have with society. Futur Africa is contributing to that transformation by creating a space where the framework of finding come and meet the framework of action where the people who are doing policies and implementing development paradigms come to meet the researchers who are working on the discovery and innovation. That's the reason why this is absolutely key to discuss the ways this connection is important and this partnership is important. To do that, we have established a number of structural elements at Futur Africa. One of them, which is very key to this discussion, is a set of six research areas on transformative areas, on reconnecting Africa, on transdisciplinarity knowledge and sustainability science on one health and many others, human rights etc. And embracing the diversity of those requirements to achieve the SDGs would likely create a community of practice which is both university members but also policy makers. And we are looking forward because of this panel composed by all those sensitivities to get new aspirations, to get new perspective and analyze them in order to address this deep and rapid acceleration that we need in Africa in order to achieve the SDGs. I wish you well and looking forward to the conclusion of the panel. Thank you. Thank you, Shake. So one of the things that was quite striking around both the two days that we've come through and Shake's conversation is that reimagining the transformation is multifaceted. It has multiple dimensions and it's inherently dealing with complexity. It is a tough task and as we shift from the reimagining to the transformation we've got to grapple with that and figure out what we're going to do and I think we're pretty much breaking new ground. We're covering new territory and to help us along with that we've got a panel of three experts from again multiple many different dimensions. So we have Maria Cortes who is the Vice President of Networks at the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. We have Professor Labode Popula who is the Vice Chancellor at the University of Osun in Nigeria and we have Caroline Makasa who is the Acting Director of the SDG Network Centre in Rwanda. So I'm going to start off with our first panelist, Maria. So Maria is the Vice President of Networks in the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network In this role she leads the Sustainable Development Solutions Network's efforts to build a global network of universities, research centres and civil society organisations. The network pursues sustainable development innovation at local levels through research, public education, executive training, demonstration products and the convening of social stakeholders and incubation initiatives. Maria holds a BSc and MSc degrees in physics from Complutence University in Madrid and a Master's Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. Welcome Maria and thank you for joining us. Thank you very much, Professor Tixen. And congratulations on this wonderful workshop and such a pertinent topic. As you were saying at the beginning we have just nine years to achieve the SDGs we have also an increased understanding of the urgency of addressing climate change and now we have the COVID-19 pandemic upon us. So the need to greatly expand society's capacity to resolve and to address these complex challenges is more important and more urgent than ever. And at SDSN we agree with what has just been said. We think that universities are the best placed institutions to tackle this challenge. Universities are the world's leading multi-disciplinary knowledge centers and they can help diagnose complex challenges as well as propose multi-dimensional solutions. Universities are educating the leaders of the future and hundreds of millions of them. And universities are indispensable in the role of fostering both technological but also governing innovations. And then finally universities are ideally placed to convene various stakeholders. They have the expertise, the independence, the social trust, a long-term perspective. All of these are essential to achieving the SDGs. So this puts universities in a unique position. However, I think it has been very clearly said already, the scale and the pace required by the challenges of sustainable development is so vast that continuing to do what we're already doing will not be enough. Even if what we're doing is great. The SDGs call for deep transformations and for transformations everywhere. So incremental approaches will not be enough. It's very interesting that you've talked about reimagining because Otto Scharmer was recently in a workshop that we organized around this topic and was saying that most institutions, not just universities, but companies and even governments are thinking about addressing our current challenges just by optimizing what they were already doing. Instead of reimagining, using exactly the same word as you did, what we could be doing differently. What else could we be doing and how could we be doing differently? I want to refer to the sustainable development report that the University of Pretoria has recently published. Because there you have a matrix that proposes to drivers of success when addressing sustainable development. And I could not agree more on these two. First of all, it's the nature of our engagement and the relationships that we established to address these challenges. What kind of partnerships are we setting up? And the second is the nature of the knowledge and of the solutions that we developed to address these challenges. And so the report proposes that we need to move from very transactional relationships that have a narrow set of solutions that are very siloed, most likely producing just incremental changes to transformative relationships. Transformative relationships where we are co-designing, co-creating and co-owning very multifaceted solutions. And these solutions have most likely the common good as the ultimate goal. This is exactly what we believe at SDSM. We are mobilising academia. We are establishing these transformational partnerships with stakeholders from around the world and from different sectors. And we are co-designing complex solutions around a shared purpose, the achievement of the SDGs. And how do we facilitate this method of achieving the SDGs? Well, first of all, we have this massive network of universities. We currently have 1400 member institutions, most of them universities from 160 different countries. Our networks, sorry, our members contribute to our work, our programs, our design of solutions, pathways, our reports. We also create spaces for these members to interact with each other, such as, for example, the International Conference for Sustainable Development. Our members also work and organise themselves in national and regional networks, of which we have 41. And these networks focus on three objectives. The first one is localising the SDGs. So they work, the universities of one country work together with their governments, their private sector as well as civil society. On thinking through what does this agenda mean for us? What are the specific challenges for our country? What are areas where we need more granular data to really evaluate whether we're making progress? Our networks are also promoting high quality education, as well as research collaboration for sustainable development. And finally, our networks are vetting and launching solution initiatives, including the support of preparation of long term pathways. These long term pathways are just very technical modelling exercises that prove that achieving the SDGs is in fact possible. And while it's a very technical exercise, it's done in collaboration with civil society that contributes to alert whether we're leaving anyone behind, as well as the industry that can map out potential trade-offs that the model has not realised. So again, done in a very multi-stakeholder approach. Our networks are led by local leaders and I'm very happy to see that we have Professor Popula today, our chair of our Nigerian network, one of our most active networks. And our networks are also working with us on a number of tools that we put forward for members to use the SDGs as a framework for transformation. We published three years ago a report called How to Get Started with the SDGs in Universities, and we've most recently published a new guide called Accelerating Education for the SDGs in Universities that focuses on how universities can help learners develop the necessary knowledge, skills, but also mindsets. I could not agree more with our previous speaker. We do need to change our mindset if we are to confront these challenges in a completely different way, if we are to be able to enter these multi-stakeholder partnerships and to propose and co-create these multi-faceted solutions. We developed these reports with the help of many universities from around the world that send case studies of how they're doing things differently. And we're going to be opening a call for new case studies towards the end of this month. So what we're looking for right now is either very innovative approaches to teaching the SDGs or ways in which universities are mainstreaming the SDGs throughout the whole university. Let me just conclude by saying that while we were writing this guide, we kept coming back to the question of the scale and the pace of the change that is needed. And the conclusion that we were reaching is that while we have a lot going on around the world, it is probably not at the right pace and scale. And therefore, once again, universities do need to undergo a deep transformation. This is why we left the last chapter of the guide for this particular problem. We confronted it with a lot of humility because as you were saying, this is a tremendously complex question. There are numerous barriers and also universities are set up in a specific way to keep their independence, to be able to provide the high quality services that they do for society. So this is not an easy question, but in this last chapter we proposed some ideas on how this is happening around the world. We also showcase four different cases from Australia, from Malaysia, from Spain and from South Africa, specifically from the University of Pretoria, that I think could serve as inspiration for other universities. So I encourage you to look into that. But this is an open question. We've hosted a number of workshops on this topic and we will be publishing small briefs on these addressing specific questions such as, for example, what would be appropriate regulatory frameworks to address this transformation or what are the key and most urgent aspects that universities need to transform. So we're very humble about it. I agree with you. This is a tremendously complicated question and I'm very eager to hear today what our other speakers have to say and to read up the conclusions of these two very exciting days. Once again, thank you for organizing these and congratulations. Thank you Maria. Just listening to that conversation, what strikes me is that we commonly use the word transformation in a very gloeb way and we talk transformation without really understanding its implications. Transformation is not a continuous improvement. It's a radical change and a radical disruption that is required in the face of the challenges we face and the future that we'd like to create. In that sense, transformation needs to start from within. Maria has given us an indication of some of the areas where we would look at transforming, particularly around our core functions in university and research and education, et cetera. With that, I'd like to go on to Prof Labodi, who's the Vice Chancellor of the University of Osun and the Director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network in Nigeria. Prof Labodi's role as Vice Chancellor is actively working on transforming the University of Osun into a model university with a meaningful impact on society. Prof Labodi is a renowned academic and of note his fields of study are firmly in the sustainable development space with previous appointment as professor of forest economics. He's a prolific publisher and has over 150 publications and has been presented with numerous awards. He also plays a leadership role in many notable professional bodies across the continent. Welcome Labodi and thank you for joining us. Now going into your dialogue, I mean flowing from the work that you've been doing at the University of Osun and what we are collectively undertaking on reimagining universities in complex and uncertain times. What are your reflections on how universities can transform to turn these reimagined ideas and intentions into reality? Well, thank you very much, Brian. I would also want to appreciate Sheik and Maria for her insightful presentation. There's no doubt we are living in very complex and uncertain times and so many are happening around the world. Africa is not left behind. We have population growing and leaves and bounds. Climate change is a big, big issue. We have ecosystem decline and there are surprises almost on a daily basis. COVID-19 of course is one of the surprises and so what this truly tells us is that we cannot be business as usual. So we have to reimagine how the university system will continue to run so that we can be relevant to the rest of the society. Now my own thoughts about this is that over the years universities have been doing this business as usual way of doing things. I'm happy that Sheik said earlier on that we are not just the only knowledge providers. We can find knowledge from other places. Even the ordinary people on the streets also have some knowledge but over the years we've had this arrogance of feeling that the universities are only the knowledge givers or the knowledge creators or the knowledge providers. So it's always been business as usual. But my thinking and this is what we're trying to do in my universities is that we should no longer be business as usual. So what exactly do we think we should be doing if we have to be relevant to the rest of the society, if we have to reimagine universities, if we have to be a transport commission institution. The first one is that we have to respect our clients and who clients, our students, the parents, the community within which we operate. We need to respect them. And most times those of us in the university system think that we're high up there. We know it all and we don't seem to respect our stakeholders. So first and foremost it's important that we respect our clients to go into advocacy and lobbying. Universities don't really have lobbying skills. If you have to deal with the rest of the society, if you have to get information from people, if you have to work with people, you must have what I call lobbying and advocacy skills. So we need to understand the business language, the language of the society. I mean we cannot stand up there and think that we can do it alone. We need to understand the language of the society. So it's not just about laboratories, it's not just about conferences. Let's speak the language of the ordinary man on the street. Of course we also try problem analysis, but I'm not very sure our problem analysis are always very thorough. We need to have thorough problem analysis. We have to involve stakeholders. You cannot do thorough problem analysis without involving stakeholders. Stakeholders have to be carried along. Start from the bottom. If you're dealing with farmers, you need to know what the problems of the farmers are. If you're dealing with manufacturers, you need to know what their problems are. So you need to do thorough problem analysis. Then multidisciplinary has become a buzzword. Whether we like it or not, again silos gone are the days of the silos. So we need to have multidisciplinary teams. And the sustainable development goals makes this mandatory. There are 17 goals. All of them can stand alone. They are not divisible. They are all interconnected. So it's not possible for you to say you're a geographer or you're a chemist and you want to work alone. We need multidisciplinary teams. And of course they don't have to be too many. If they are too many, they become confusing. So we also need partnership. Gladly one of the key goals in the sustainable development goals, goal 17 is about partnerships. We need to have partnership. And when you talk about partnership, there has to be objectives. Equity becomes an important thing. Mutual benefit, transparency. And we also need to start thinking beyond national. Quite a number of universities, particularly in West Africa, becoming local and national universities. We have to look at the regional level. In Africa we have to start thinking about Nepal. We have to start thinking about AU, West Africa we have to start thinking about Air Force. And we have to start thinking about power problems. But we also have to look beyond our immediate localities. Now it's also important, if we have to be relevant, we have to be transformational, that we are able to disseminate our messages as universities. You have to be able to disseminate our messages. And these messages must be consistent. The messages must be consistent. They must be knowledge rich to our target audience. It's not just about publishing. Publishing, yes, very good. Do you disseminate what you're publishing? Knowledge sharing, very important. Knowledge management, very important. Information transpires, very important. And for us to be able to do this equitably and very well, we need to involve policy makers. Policy makers can make or maa whatever achievements are in the university. So we have to approach them very cautiously. The press is very important, the media. Good information packages from us. How they can reach out to the target audience. Policy formulation, yes, at the university level, we need to formulate policies, but we have to make it participatory. Now the universities, particularly in this part of the world, are always very cautious about politicians. Politicians are also human beings. We need to approach them. We need to respect them. We need to work them if we have to be transformational. The end users of our products of research, actually at times I have discovered that they are smarter than us in the university. We need to find a way of learning from them. And finally, I think we have to start looking at building sustainability into whatever we do. We mentioned that there is little sustainability in what we do in the university. We want to start something. When we do stability into what we do, we find ways of scaling it up. Now we are in the era of big data. We have started thinking of how do we accumulate data, data that will be useful for the future. We are in... And also finally, at the building, we are not very good at that in the university. So that's why we are caught on our way at most of the times. We have to build what we do. I'd like to say that I hope this way some questions come up. I can address them. I would like to congratulate Brian and his team as well as my co-panelists. A very good afternoon once again. Thank you, Prof. Lobode. There's certainly a lot of content in that and a lot of food for thought. But just a couple of the messages that I'm pulling out from this year is that certainly it's no longer business as usual. But part of the issues about it being no longer business as usual are firstly a very common theme that came out from Maria's message is that humility is important. And my interpretation there is that we must be human. And that is the start of us being humanistic. It's important that we value people and we value the different sources of knowledge and their perspectives. And that sets us up to be in touch with them and speak a language that the different stakeholders can understand. We need to be building relationships that are underpinned by trust and embed trans-disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity into the way we do things but with critical priorities and do it in a way that we focus on renewal and resilience. Now I'm going to move on to our last panel speaker Miss Caroline Makasa. Caroline is the acting director of the STG Centre for Africa based in Rwanda and it's an international organisation that supports government, civil society, businesses and academic institutions to accelerate progress towards the achievement of the sustainable development goals in Africa. Caroline holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Namibia and a master's in science and sustainable development from the University of London. She has extensive experience in market development, capacity building and establishing high level partnerships. Welcome Caroline and thank you for joining us. Thank you very much and good afternoon to everyone. I think this is an exciting topic and I think also it's coming I think timely when the world has witnessed a real shift in how everything is done we can no longer rely on doing things the way we've previously been doing them and so I think this is a really timely discussion and I think I want to thank everybody including those that have spoken before me because I think some of we are thinking this is interesting. I want to start first by just reflecting on when I did my master's in sustainable development I remember I was searching for a university this was like 11 years ago and I couldn't really find a university in Africa where I could actually study sustainable development but I was able to find a university overseas and when I did my MSc in sustainable development then it was really kind of a very new topic still a new topic and also still a topic that people question to say why are you doing this but at that time I was fully involved in trade and investment and people couldn't understand why I wanted to do sustainable development and it had all these wide ranging courses from ecology to design and innovation to really topics that you wouldn't think would be part of it was at that time a bit of a strange curriculum but the more you dive into it the more you begin to understand so innovation I think is the start of everything I mean when I listen to everyone and I think you know as long as we're not willing to be innovative then I think we will always lack behind I mean transformation is all about leadership leadership is also about change sometimes we have to be very dynamic we have to do things that we've never done before I mean we are not all doing things we've never done before we have people who are working at home in the past this was something which was inconceivable to work at home you had to it was not something that was practiced you actually had to be in an office and so on so all these I think the African needs really a change in the way we think a change in the way we do things but also I agree that we really need to appreciate those that we work with I think if in African universities need to change the way they do things a lot of the African universities are still very close some of them it takes them many many years to even transform or change even a curriculum so maybe just to tell you a bit about what the center has been doing in the area of tertiary education we've had dialogues one of the biggest dialogues that we had was where we were able to mobilize and have representatives high level representatives from various tertiary educational institutions within Africa and at the end of that big conference that we had there was a plan a roadmap that was developed just named some of the targets in that roadmap one of them was to have at least 25 universities in Africa to be listed among the top 300 universities globally and also another one was to create a robust network of African vice-chancellers championing high educational reform agenda in Africa these were just some of them and basically the roadmap was aimed at creating interventions to enhance the teaching and learning process to build competitive business regimes within universities to perform transformational leadership in universities build competitive research capacity in universities and to nurture and support strong and effective outreach programs these programs told a little bit but it's something that we are reviving but one of the practical things that the center has now embarked on is to have interns we have partnerships now with some universities some in Africa, one of them is African leadership university and another one is Syracos University in New York is to have them come to the center and gain practical experience about SDGs and also how to solve problems because I think sometimes the curriculum is so textbook and students are not able to solve problems and really sustainability is about its practical things it's everyday problems but some of them also require an innovative approach to be able to resolve these problems so this is one of the things that we've started I mean we'll actively have some students joining us actually in May so each cycle will have students coming for a period of about two to three months some may stay longer maybe four months but I think we have to make things practical and I agree with the professor that spoke before me that universities have to build partnerships outside the walls of universities and look very broad and have a very broad view of how to do things because SDGs themselves are quite complex thank you thank you Caroline I'm still grappling with the nature of the transformation that we need to go through so we use words like innovation, transdisciplinarity commonly and frequently but what I'm trying to get at I don't think we're necessarily going to resolve it at this particular session but how do we embed these and hardwire them into the way we do things around here as universities, how do we make them part and parcel of our fabric and part and parcel of our culture how do we have a culture of transdisciplinarity how do we create cultures of innovation so that that enables us to be resilient but leaving that question we'd like to announce that we are honoured truly honoured to have professor Jeffrey Sachs with us today and I'd like to warmly welcome him he really doesn't need any introduction from me and to be honest I don't believe that going through his resume will do any real justice to him it's freely available but what I will say is that Jeffrey Sachs is a globally renowned champion of sustainable development and the SDGs he represents thought leadership he is a significant contributor to the path that the world seeks to pursue and the path that we are seeking to pursue he pushes the boundaries and is an inspiration welcome Jeffrey and thank you for joining us the floor is yours thank you so much what a thrill and honour to be with the university leaders across Africa thanks Caroline for your leadership of the SDG centre for Africa and let me tell you how much I hope I can contribute to your deliberations I do believe that Africa's universities should be playing a vanguard role in a massive and rapid transformation of Africa to a knowledge society and I think universities have a unique opportunity to do this as well we know that we need change at an unprecedented speed there are so many challenges the world is disrupted profoundly technologically geopolitically environmentally pandemics we're really in very unstable and very fast changing times and I believe that we need to have well educated and trained populations in order to be able to survive and thrive in such times I'm watching the unfolding disaster in the United States for example of COVID-19 where we have 525,000 deaths so far and it's clearly because our former president and much of the public doesn't have the scientific knowledge to be able to behave properly in the face of a crisis like this whereas in East Asian countries where education is much better public knowledge of science is much better government leadership is more technically trained the epidemic was brought under control quickly so I believe that as society's core knowledge institutions universities absolutely need to play a fundamental and leadership role I also think that in the African context we need to think about how to massively scale up access to higher education and I personally am persuaded that online education is a key part of that and I would love to hear the views of the vice chancellors and what the various campuses are doing maybe there's not agreement on this but I believe that if we could get digital access to more of the population we could also have low cost mass education on a scale that is unimaginable in the past it's just a lot less expensive to provide core learning online than it is on campuses not that it should be all one way or another certainly I love campuses I've lived on a campus basically for the last 49 years if you can believe it since entering college I've never left living on a campus but I do believe that online education offers an opportunity that is unprecedented to reach more young people to provide education at a lower cost I know that the cost of on campus learning in the United States is probably I would estimate 25 times more expensive on campus than it is online so I think we could do something unprecedented in mass education if we put our minds to it and I would love to work with the universities in any way that the sustainable development solutions network could be helpful to you I'm speaking also with entrepreneurs about all online master's degree programs and other programs and this could be something that a network of universities in Africa take up on a shared basis to and maybe it's already happening as far as I know but I do think that there's a tremendous opportunity here of course it's almost trite to say but it's probably worth saying that universities play several fundamental roles in society of course they teach and educate this is number one second is engage in serious research that no other part of society has the capacity time interest or motivation to do so research activities of course businesses do it to some extent governments pretty very little most of the rest of society not so much it remains to the universities to be the knowledge creators the in-depth analyzers of trends a third area is incubation of business we know that each of the major universities can become a hub for start-up businesses that are innovative and directed towards problem solving and in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the biotech sector in Stanford and San Francisco that turned out to be the digital technologies in Pittsburgh it turned out to be robotics organized around Carnegie Mellon University and so on so I think that the African universities can be incubators of new businesses and that this is an extremely important role to play and the fourth area in addition to the teaching the research, the incubation of business is the advising of governments and I find governments more and more aware that they need to cooperate with universities in order to address problems this isn't automatic it depends on the leader Trump was a fool and a dangerous man had absolutely no interest in universities but that's because he was a nut and a completely irresponsible president now we're seeing a greatly stepped up role of American universities even in the early days of the Biden administration but I would say across Africa there are many governments that would reach out to universities for working on problem solving on key areas I think when the question is what should universities do to move beyond the slogans and so forth of interdisciplinarity and so on the question is what are the major problems that need to be addressed and I would say that the major problems in the African context are clear one is obviously major transformations in energy to mass electrification based on Africa's wonderful renewable energy potential mass digital inclusion given the role that digital technologies potentially could play for education for healthcare for governance for finance and payments for agriculture for sustainable monitoring and so forth so I would hope that Africa would see African countries and universities would see the digital revolution as a blockbuster set of technologies that would greatly empower speedy development in the region and offer new kinds of services telemedicine, distance learning digital currencies and e-payments and so forth that could really tremendously accelerate overall sustainable development in the region I found when I was heading the Earth Institute at Columbia University which is a transdisciplinary unit of the university that the thing that brought the different disciplines together was not a slogan or a motto or even a shared commitment to sustainable development it was specific problem solving so it was challenges of the energy transition or challenges of sustainable land use or challenges of urban digital transformation that got researchers from different disciplines legal, business, engineering and so forth to work together because when you're solving a problem when you're addressing a societal need the disciplines obviously take a back seat to the difficult complicated problem that you're confronting and you realize quite soon you need many kinds of expertise working together to untie the knot or to pass through the labyrinth of actions that are needed so my basic question and hope is how could we and how could I help of course in my in whatever modest way that SDSN could but how could the African universities lead to a massive scale up of access to higher education at an unprecedented speed to make up for lost time to recognize the centrality of knowledge and training in the new technologies to what extent would online to what extent would cross country partnerships to what extent would an Africa wide network to what extent would enhanced financing all help to play a role for the massive scale up of education second what can be done in order to support the practical problem solving through the university curricula the research agenda and the actions together with government a third question for me do you share my feeling that the digital breakthroughs and digital technologies are a kind of organizing principle by training young Africans in digital skills in of course artificial intelligence robotics, 3D printing coding and software digital entrepreneurship digital startups and so forth that this is as promising as it seems to me at least because I think that with these new technologies many many parts of the economy could benefit tremendously and with a very rapid uptake so these are questions that I would like to pose back to the chancellors but I want to end by saying that I find this challenge of the massive support scale up quality of Africa's institutions of higher education as being central perhaps the most important leading edge of the rapid sustainable development transformation of Africa so anything I can do to help I want you to count on me personally and count on the United Nations sustainable development solutions network and I know speaking alongside Caroline Count on the SDG center for Africa for this as well. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you prof sex I'm going to just highlight some of the key takeaways that I got from what you're saying and then I'm going to pass you on to prof Kupe who will talk in a little bit more detail around the digital transformation and leverage of digital technology around effective education and research and scaling that some points that really struck me that you said African universities should play or to play a vanguard role and I like that because the continent is ours the challenges are ours and so must be the solutions and surely we have the ability to respond in relation to the work that we do that research, education, policy advice influence and translation that you highlighted such as incubation I'm also interested in your idea and we certainly are going to pursue it in the University of Pretoria around embedding, transdisciplinarity and innovation by design by focusing on specific challenges and I think to a large extent that is happening we have the Arua centers of excellence that do focus on specific African challenges by design for transdisciplinarity conversations and this can then also shape the research and education agenda around the virtual and online learning and use of digital technology for mass education and more effective education prof Kupe, your thoughts I think the issue is not whether it is an opportunity or not it is an opportunity which we have to grapple if you like the issue really is that you say you offer your own personal and other networks to assist with this here is the problem, absolutely is and here I speak from a privileged position that my university doesn't exactly have the problem I'm quite sure you know of the digital divide that exist between the north and the south but in the south being as the global south is the terminology goes the problem is that too many universities on the African continent are not actually connected to the extent that they can do decent every day without thinking about digital teaching and learning of any kind and we saw this last year so lots of universities fell behind in South Africa which is considered to have a much better economy than others we have 26 public universities our academic calendar runs from January to December only 10 of the universities could after a hard lockdown go online effectively and complete the academic year in 2020 many are still about to complete the academic year 2020 but the academic year 2021 has started so you have that and the simple reason was that they were not digitally connected they didn't the students they enrolled come from such backgrounds that they don't own an internet connected device and also the university said it does not have a teaching and learning management system that can deliver effective high quality education because what you don't want as well is to repeat the some kinds of analogue teaching and learning that we have had in Africa which is not quality teaching and the high quality education does not deliver the skills industry or even the public service actually needs so the challenge is how do we get and I like the point you made earlier on is that this could be a project where you digitally connect all of the African universities and by the way the schools as well because we get our actually we get our students from the high schooling system if they are not connected they will not be digitally literate so something that wires for all of the the schooling system and also enables them as you rightly said and I put it in a document I wrote co-authored last year to my colleagues the 26 vice chancellor when COVID hit I co-wrote with my director of institutional planning a document called reimagining higher education in South Africa one of the things I proposed in that document was that we should actually have shared IT resources and other services on the back of those shared resources we could also develop co-design and develop common courses that we could teach together because also our capacities are not always what they should be so just the cost of going online is very expensive I am in a different situation even among the more privileged universities my faculty and students could go online for teaching and learning without purchasing data my rest of my colleagues purchase data at very high cost I have a question that data costs in Africa are too high they are not affordable they exacerbate even in South Africa they exacerbate the digital divide so we also need to have a cooperation from the telecommunications companies who are largely monopolies to be able to think of the greater common good and interest lower the data prices contribute to wiring up or digitizing the schooling and the university system we did hold, I was part of a small team of four vice-chancellers who met with some of the telcos to try and say could you create a digital backbone for all of the universities the discussions didn't go anyway confidentially one of them said no, okay if I do it on an exclusive basis I will do it for you guys but we actually didn't want to want to embed anti-competitive behavior and also the entrenchment of a monopoly in the system so let me put it this way as well there is no way in which Africa could achieve the sustainable development goals or develop any further if it does not join the digital revolution if digital transformations do not happen I see it at my university way around 55,000 students we ended up only having to support under 4,000 students we bought them laptops it may be just bland but because we had a sophisticated digital system that didn't need data everybody was online doing both synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning and we saw that there was better performance in both semesters of last year than when we were a hybrid version with the online but lastly in contact in class mode you may also see digitalization and digital education and connection is very important but getting an education is also much more than sitting behind a computer so what we would like to do at Investor Pretorius to innovate around a strong online component but which is a fairly nuanced and calibrated if you like face to face contact modes to teach some of the skills you need in the 21st century collaboration, cultural sensitivity emotional intelligence engagement and so on but yes largely on the back of an online platform and differentiated professional students postgraduate students might do everything online but undergraduates might need some contact classes small tutorial debate group syndicates group discussions and that kind of stuff wow so inspiring thank you very much can I get a copy of your 2019 report or 2020 report if you would email that that would be fantastic but I wonder whether it would be possible to put together a project of connecting all african universities and we could think about a second section connecting all african high schools which I think would be also quite thrilling I don't know what the price tag of that might be but I have in mind some billionaires foundations and so on that should take that up because I would imagine for some hundreds of millions of dollars it would be possible to essentially get the physical infrastructure in place and the billionaires today of course Bezos and his foundation that's 200 billion dollars of personal wealth and Google Gates Foundation Microsoft this should not be such a big hurdle to get done quickly actually if there was and I think the attractiveness of an Africa wide proposal if it's feasible without huge huge headaches to put something in place to say all universities should be digitally connected I really think that is both necessary and could attract support and if not those foundations it could be Chinese government it could be Japan it could be others it would just be interesting to try to do that that would be number one for me second I'd love your advice on not only data access but access to online journals and scientific information you know when I log on to my Columbia university system I have access I would estimate to about 50,000 journals free instantaneously available I would imagine that few African universities have any kind of access such as that but it does seem to me that we should be able to organize an effort that that online access is either made available for free or at a enormously discounted set of prices for the African universities because of course the marginal cost of providing that access is literally zero or almost zero so I think that the chance for a massive extension of access to the online scientific and other journals would be very good but I'd love your advice on that because I don't really know the situation that say University of Pretoria or other universities face in terms of that kind of access and then when it comes to data I do think we should go to GSMA the global the global association of telecoms providers to my mind they need to come back with an answer for the universities that is not simply pay your commercial prices or negotiate on your own but something more systematic and I think the Secretary General the UN could well get involved in that I can't speak for him but he has a roadmap on digital inclusion that calls for universal digital access and I would like to take up this idea of data access for the universities with the Secretary General also with UNESCO which obviously has a mandate for ensuring education for all and where else would one start with the APEX but with the APEX education institutions so Professor Kupe if you could help me guide us on how we could be practical in this I do think this project of digital connectedness of African universities is really essential and practicable I would say if we can get the right guidance from you the proposals for what to do thank you clearly is not going to do justice to this conversation but unfortunately we do have time limitations but what I can say for certain is that we have begun a series of conversations and we've got the pointers in terms of direction of these conversations but sadly for now in preparation for the the follow on I am going to call on our Vice Chancellor Professor Tawana Kupe to bring this session to a close as with Professor Prof Kupe does not need any formal introduction and he's been talking long through this particular dialogue but what I must say though is he's actually been immersed in the dialogue entirely for the past two days he has been ever present he's been omnipotent within the conversations and that's a very clear indication of his passion and his commitment so the only introduction I will give is he is our leader and he continues to take us on a bold journey of reimagining and transforming and he's with us at the front line Prof Kupe Thank you Dr. Chixen colleagues, partners, friends as we close this session we also conclude the Investor Pretorius inaugural Africa Week where we assemble some of the finest minds and most tenacious champions of higher education from across our continent In this gathering we are all well aware that the institutions of higher education which we represent are in all an integral part of society and that our very success depends on a world that is thriving where human dignity and justice are paramount all people are able to reach their full potential while nobody is left behind and our development does not happen at the expense of our planet we also recognize the critical role universities must play in securing the future of our continent True to our African identity we meet in a spirit of collaboration and transdisciplinary coupled with a deep concern for our humanity and for the common good of all people Together we face up to the challenges confronting us resolving to own them and to address them with the health the wealth of talents we possess we shared a compelling sense of belief that by mobilizing and harnessing our vast collective talents we are surely up to the task of responding to the mirrored challenges ahead Through this Africa week series of events we affirmed our leadership and commitment to partnerships to build capacity in Africa and accelerating impact at a scale so that we still achieve the estages and agenda 2063 in a post-COVID world Over the past two days we have navigated the complexity inherent to our sustainable development challenges and we are forward looking and future forecast as we re-emerging to universities as both sources of knowledge and education as well as agents for societal development compounding our challenge is the reality that the complexity we live in is not the study of the future and the future the complexity we live in is not static it is dynamic and full of uncertain with unexpected and pleasant surprises as we so clearly saw with the COVID-19 pandemic but in true testimony to our resolve we turned threats into opportunities and as we demonstrated with the COVID-19 pandemic we did not let a good crisis go to waste we re-imagined we adapted we found new ways to continue fulfilling our papers across all our different stakeholders within this broad and messy milieu our conversations re-enforced the imperative that in being responsive to changing societal needs our positive impacts must be demonstrated in tangible and measurable ways in the absence of making a compelling difference our institutions become redundant and are replaced by ones which do as a central challenge to developing in Africa and with clear intent to be responsive to the continent's needs we explored pathways of sustainable systems sustainable food systems in Africa achieving our shared goal of zero hunger by 2030 remains difficult and we know that it will only be achieved through working together to find ways to transform how the world produces consumes and thinks about food we believe that our deliberations we provide a valuable contribution to the food system summit which the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will convene later this year the process of re-imagining is by its very niche creative and exciting as we envision our role and contribution to a future that we all believe in yet at the same time we are mindful of the hard work required to achieve the transformation needed to turn our good ideas and intentions into reality while we are still grappling with the detail of the work ahead we know that it entails a radical change effort it includes examining our organizational structures and cultures to ensure that they are future fit and are enablers of agility innovation and responsiveness within our organizations we need to understand and build the capabilities we need for the future and re-examine and redesign the processes we use in running our organizations and delivering our service offerings our hard and soft infrastructure may need to be adapted upgraded or repurposed to support our re-imagined strategic intent all of this needs to be done through leveraging technology in a way where trans-disciplinarity and collaboration are embedded and how hard wired by design into our core functions of research, education and engagement in this transformation we are chatting new territory and this ultimate success will be determined by our ability to learn and share knowledge with each other collectively seeking an iterative and ongoing cycle of renewal and resilience as we go forward we will maintain the momentum we have created our African Vice Chancellor's Forum forms the basis of a powerful guiding coalition and we will continue to collaborate and strengthen the partnerships we have formed for our part, the University of Pretoria we work on convening this as an annual event we also put forward our four strategic trans-disciplinary platforms the Future Africa Institute where I am speaking from Engineering 4.0 Complex Javid UP and Innovation Africa at UP has potential vehicles to enable our re-imagined agenda in the course of this year we will be strengthening a common and integrated approach across the four platforms for greater leverage and greater impact we will continue to push the boundaries in the African Jobal University Framework en in May we will host the first Africa's first Nobel Prize Dialogs the meeting will bring together Nobel laureates, opinion leaders policy makers, students researchers and the public to engage in conversations on the future of work the event will culminate in the launch of a centre for the study of the future of work altogether we have exciting times ahead I would like to thank you all partners, speakers and panelists moderators all participants and special thanks to our organizing committee for bringing this event to life I urge you all to be part of the transformation to be part of a relentless pursuit for a better world that is our calling thank you