African universities as engines of development: building change together

Obreal convened the IMPACT HE Leadership & Stakeholder Forum in Nairobi, bringing together university leaders, policymakers and funding agencies from across Africa and Europe around a shared conviction: universities are more than academic institutions. They are agents of change.

More than 100 participants representing 61 institutions from 13 countries participated in a forum that was structured so that targeted capacity-building sessions for partner universities in Kenya and Ethiopia ran alongside high-level policy debates, ensuring that lived institutional experience fed directly into strategic discussion, not the other way around.

A new perspective on international cooperation

International cooperation in higher education is undergoing a fundamental reorientation. Universities are increasingly expected to act not just as knowledge producers, but as active contributors to national development strategies, public service delivery, and regional resilience.

Through IMPACT HE, Obreal has been at the centre of that shift: designing the spaces, building the partnerships, and creating the conditions for this conversation to happen at the level it deserves. The Nairobi forum brought that work into sharp focus, with agenda items covering African leadership in cooperation frameworks, coordination among international actors, and the strategic role of higher education in development planning.

What made the forum distinctive was the range of perspectives it gathered: intergovernmental bodies, national funding agencies, and universities from the ground up. This is what Obreal’s vision of interregional dialogue looks like in practice: not a single conversation between two sides, but a multilateral space where policy, funding and academic experience inform each other across regions and sectors.

Building a Team Europe for higher education

The forum was designed together with IMPACT HE’s associated partners — VLIRUOS (Belgium), EDUFI (Finland) and DAAD (Germany) — as a platform to critically explore and advance Team Europe approaches to international cooperation. By bringing key European and African actors under a shared framework, the event embodied the principles of coherence, complementarity and coordination that effective Team Europe initiatives require.

The timing was also significant: 2025 marked 50 years of EU–Kenya cooperation, making Nairobi a fitting place to reflect on how far that partnership has come, and how much further it can go when universities are given the space to lead.