If you want to go far, go together
05 December 2025
Ian Hawkings, visiting the GBSN conference in Accra, takes the opportunity to look at the growth of African business education.
Ghana is a fascinating country with a turbulent history – today it has a dynamic, growing economy (6.3% in the second quarter of this year), abundant natural and human resources, and a vibrant services sector helping to balance out the country’s previous reliance on oil and cocoa.
And so, having researched some of these things, I headed to Accra for the GBSN Beyond conference in early November, where we were to be hosted by Ashesi University. The theme of the event was ‘entrepreneurs, enterprises, and ecosystems’.
Ashesi itself is a study in the power of entrepreneurial thinking and enterprise. Its foundation story a hymn to what global ecosystems can achieve - set up as it was by a team of four MBA students from the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business, who travelled to Ghana to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a new university in the late 90’s.
The team administered surveys to students and parents, conducted interviews and focus groups, and gathered information from local and international sources. They concluded there was significant demand for a new private university in Ghana, that Ghanaian parents were willing to pay for high-quality local university education, and that the Ghanaian government supported private involvement in tertiary education.
Today the university is thriving – it has a 100-acre campus with a sports centre, health centre, and a climate innovation centre. It has four separate academic departments, offers 12 bachelors programmes, and three Masters – including a new part time MBA.
Ashesi offers some clear proof that there is demand for high quality, local business education in large parts of Africa – and yet we are way off seeing anything like the kind of expansion that we have witnessed in India and China in the last fifteen years. I realise this is a bit of a strained comparison, and that a large part of this is for an obvious reason – Africa is 54 countries after all, each with their own administrative, economic, and ethnographic differences. ‘African business education’ is a misnomer.
But in a continent with the highest incidences of entrepreneurship in the world, where birth rates mean better education and more jobs will be sorely needed in a rapidly approaching future, there’s still clearly a question mark around how higher education can be optimised. If you look at the QS rankings, there are currently only 2 African universities in the world’s top 300, and they are both South African. The Netherlands, who’s population equates to that of Senegal, has 12.
As the conference wound up in Accra, I was reminded of the famous Ghanaian saying – ‘if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together’. Organisations like GBSN, and also the Association of African Business Schools, have made it their mission to make sure management education in Africa can go far – as fast as possible.
What is clear is that African business schools can’t simply use a western or Asian playbook when looking to grow – this African challenge must be met with a uniquely African response. As another local proverb goes ‘Don't set out on a journey using someone else's donkey.’