ACE Comms TeamStakeholders of the Africa Higher Education Centres of Excellence (ACE) program marked a major milestone on Monday, April 7, 2025, with the commencement of the celebration of the program’s 10th anniversary and closure. This high-level event rallied over 500 key program stakeholders from the World Bank and other development partner organisations, academia, governments, and industry to celebrate the programmes transformative achievements over the 10 years of its implementation and to deliberate about sustaining and expanding its gains. The event at Labadi Beach Hotel in Accra, Ghana, themed celebrating a decade of impact, innovation, and excellence, opened with a compelling ceremony. The opening ceremony of the 3-day event featured welcome remarks from the heads of the two Regional Facilitation Units (RFUs) for the ACE program, namely Prof. Olusola Oyewole, Secretary-General for the Association of African Universities (AAU), the RFU for the ACE program in Western and Central Africa and Prof. Gaspard Banyankimbona, Executive Secretary for the Inter-University Council for East Africa, the RFU for the ACE program in Eastern and Southern Africa.
The two RFU heads focused their addresses on the program’s impactful achievements, particularly producing over 90,000 PhD and Master’s graduates, obtaining over 400 international and national program accreditations, and publishing over 10,000 research papers. They also highlighted the program’s success in fostering partnerships among universities and with industry across the continent, leading to enhanced research outputs and innovations. Encapsulating a shared vision for an empowered, innovative, and interconnected African higher education landscape poised to drive the continent’s development forward, the RFU heads’ addresses also emphasized the contributions of their respective organizations and outlined their strategic directions. They underscored and advocated continuous investments and policy and regulatory frameworks that effectively address regional development challenges and support the sustainability of the ACE gains, ensuring that they are not confined to the present generation but extended to future generations as well.
The opening ceremony also featured a rousing keynote address from Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana. Presenting under the theme of The Vision for Higher Education for Africa and the Journey So Far: 10 Years of ACE, Prof. Amfo recognized and commended the transformative role of the ACE program in reshaping the African higher education, research, and innovation landscape. She demonstrated why the establishment of the ACEs was necessary, the program’s impressive achievements so far, and the way forward. She particularly acknowledged the program’s significant contribution to the rise in postgraduate enrolment in Africa but also its earmarking of over 30% of this enrolment for females through targeted scholarships and other opportunities, especially in STEM education and other male-dominated areas.
The Vice Chancellor also highlighted the ACE program’s achievements in international benchmarking, culminating in the accreditation of over 133 academic programs; improved teaching, learning, and tracking; and enhanced industry linkages and cross-border collaborations. Prof. Amfo also acknowledged the ACE program’s development impact, citing the classical cases of the three leading University of Ghana ACEs. She hailed the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) for developing several seed varieties and tightening food security in Ghana and Africa, the West Africa Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) for sequencing genomes and helping to save a lot of black lives during the Ebola and COVID-19 global pandemics, and the West African Genetic Medicine Centre (WAGMC), the first of its kind in Africa for working assiduously to reverse Africa’s sickle cell disease narrative.
For the way forward, Prof Amfo proposed unending partnerships and collaborations and the need to attract, motivate, and retain top-tier global researchers and obtain political will, favorable policy, and sufficient budgetary allocations. Ending her keynote address, Prof Amfo urged higher education stakeholders to leverage the remarkable research outcomes of the ACEs to address global and continental challenges, acknowledging universities as key players in national and global economies.
Following the opening ceremony, the second plenary session convened a panel of academic experts, policymakers, and development partners to identify strategies, share experiences, and develop a roadmap for the future. This panel discussion session was moderated by World Bank’s Acting Regional Practice Director for Africa Regional Integration, Franz Drees-Gross. On the panel was Malawi’s Minister for Higher Education, Honorable Dr Jessie Kabwire, who appreciated the contribution of the ACE program to the government’s delivery of economic development, especially in terms of creating jobs for its people. She also acknowledged Malawi’s increasing enrolment and narrowing gaps in higher education, especially relative to quality assurance and the localization of the Malawian educational system and aligning it with the country’s value system.
Reiterating economic growth as one of Guinea’s benefits from the ACE program, Economy and Finance Minister, Honorable Mourana Soumah, also linked the ACE model to the vision of the government of Guinea. Advocating enhanced and sustained benefits, the minister called on key stakeholders to work very closely together, leveraging the shared vision and the power of collaborations. She pledged the Guinean government’s continuous commitment and cooperation to ensure the maximum impact of the ACE model not only in Guinea but also in Africa.
From WACCI’s perspective, the Center Leader, Professor Eric Danquah, enumerated the center’s achievements and impacts, as including the training of over 120 PhDs who were trailing the blaze, leading major agriculture research hubs, and impacting numerous African lives as well as the development of over 250 seed varieties that were contributing to averting the prospect of food shortage in Africa. He also outlined the center’s succession and sustainability plans, demonstrating how these plans aligned with the University of Ghana’s strategic plan and would ensure seamless autonomous running, robust governance, and enhanced impacts beyond World Bank’s funding, AAU’s technical support, and the university’s supervision. Prof Danquah highlighted the center’s plan to commercialize the hundreds of seed varieties it had developed, create an endowment fund, intensify grant proposal writing, recruit and retain top-tier scientists from across the world, and tap into the government of Ghana’s proposed 24-hour economy to sustain WACCI’s existence, activities, and achievements.
Re-echoing the sentiments of the Guinean Minister of Economy and Finance Minister, Mourana Soumah, Ms Sophia Ndemutila Ashipala, Head of Education at the African Union Commission, and Ms Gabrielle Leroux, Higher Education Lead at the French Development Agency, intimated how education, specifically higher education and research, was a central priority to their organizations’ visions, recognizing the major roles universities play in achieving the sustainable development goals. They expressed their organizations’ continuous support to replicate and spread the ACE model across the continent’s higher education institutions.
The two opening plenaries set the tone for a reflective and forward-looking event whose subsequent high-level discussions on sustaining and scaling the ACE program underscored the pivotal role in strengthening African higher education, building research capacity, and solving regional development challenges.