This article first appeared on University World News
We have built the theoretical half of a bridge. It is elegant in places, diligently maintained in others, and inspected with great seriousness by committees who admire its symmetry. Students walk to the edge, transcript in hand, and discover a view – wide, impressive, and distinctly lacking a path to the other side. Employers wave from the far bank. We wave back and call it a partnership.
The gap is not a moral failing of students or a temporary shortage of internships. It is structural. We operate with a code that sorts ideas into true and false. Workplaces sort effort into paid and unpaid, safe and unsafe, urgent and can-wait.
When we invite a firm to ‘align with our outcomes’, we are asking an entity that lives by calendars, cash flow and liability to speak in our language of semesters, credits and rubrics.
An African university has the added complication of reality. Our labs teach thermodynamics; the grid teaches load-shedding. Our accounting courses explain cost structures; procurement teaches what happens when a customs delay meets a deadline.
Our public policy seminars cover regulatory design; licensing offices teach the epistemology of queues. If we want our graduates to cross the river, we must build for this terrain, not for a brochure to market a qualification.
Competence earns credits
We are re-engineering from our side. The first change is time. We are replacing the fantasy of a decisive, last-minute internship with a cadence of practice that earns credit – because it earns competence.
Degrees will carry an architecture of alternating terms: study, then work, then study again – predictable rhythms that allow employers to plan and students to grow by iteration rather than by a single leap.
Assessment remains ours, co-designed with hosts, and it focuses on transfer: what students can do with knowledge under constraints that do not respect chapter headings.
Risk, long the quiet saboteur of good intentions, is being handled as design rather than as improvisation. We are negotiating pooled insurance for work-integrated learning with our public insurers and, until the bureaucracy catches up, underwriting basic cover ourselves so departments stop smuggling students into workplaces on hope.
We are standardising supervision agreements, duty-of-care protocols, and modest stipends where placements would otherwise exclude the students who cannot afford to work free of charge. Equity without funding is theatre.
Theory meets friction
Between professor and factory floor, we are building an ecology that translates without flattening. Legal clinics that argue real cases, urban studios that co-design with city agencies, policy labs that ship code to ministries, agronomy field schools that follow the crop seasons – these are not ornaments for the prospectus. They are the places where theory meets friction while someone is watching.
We are staffing them with professionals who have careers – not heroic volunteers – and we are revising promotion guidelines so that building these boundary institutions counts as scholarship. We cannot continue to treat course redesign and partnership-building as hobbies and then wonder why people avoid them.
Who teaches must change along with what is taught. Professors of practice are not trophies for guest lectures; they are co-authors of courses and co-judges of assessment where competence is inseparable from context. Their time counts in our promotion calculus.
Reciprocally, our academics need sanctioned time in practice – in firms, clinics, utilities, agencies – without being treated as deserters to the enemy camp. Sabbaticals in the field sharpen questions; they do not dull minds. We are also formalising a diaspora circuit: alumni and partners who return for recurring, credit-bearing residencies that anchor knowledge locally rather than as a one-off conference performance.
Where practice lives
Practice, in our context, does not live only in boardrooms and laboratories. The African economy is braided from formal enterprises, public agencies, cooperatives and a vast informal sector that solves problems with more ingenuity than paperwork.
We are designing placements for all of it. Micro-enterprise incubators will host students under supervised clusters, with our staff providing the safety and pedagogy the host cannot. Rural rotations in public clinics, water boards, and extension services will earn the same credit as the glamorous internship whose main practical lesson is how to book a meeting.
Where sites are scarce or fragile, we will use simulation judiciously – digital twins of grids and ports, case libraries drawn from African realities – to prepare students for practice, not to replace it. If we teach with cases from Boston, we will produce graduates ready for Boston.
Assessment will change because it must. We will continue to examine what students know; we will also require them to show what they can do, explain why they did it, and defend their choices to someone who is not already sympathetic.
Reflective journals will be read seriously rather than collected as ritual. Short vivas will test judgment under constraint. External examiners will include practitioners who can recognise competence even when it arrives without perfect prose.
Artificial intelligence will help us with the drudgery – clustering common errors to guide teaching, drafting feedback for instructors to refine – but judgment will remain human, especially where AI fails to understand our languages or our context.
You may ask whether our systems can keep up. At present, our bridges collapse in the registrar’s office more often than in the river. So we are fixing the friction. Practice requires supplies; supplies require procurement that acts before the semester ends.
We are shifting from emergency purchases to pre-approved catalogues for laboratories and fieldwork, with delivery deadlines that align with the timetable, not with the fiscal year. We are publishing service-level commitments for the unglamorous: time to repair on essential equipment, uptime on the learning network, turnaround on placement paperwork. These are not customer service gestures. They are academic timetables by another name.
We are budgeting for practice as if it were a laboratory, because it is. Field supervision, transport, insurance, safety gear, data stipends for off-campus learning – these costs are being ringfenced rather than scavenged. Where public funding falls short, we are structuring donor and industry partnerships to pay for capacity, not just for headline projects. A partner that wants to host our students will find us ready with a timetable and an invoice for the part of the bridge that must live after their logo leaves the room.
Quality assurance is being repurposed from border guard to safety rail. Instead of freezing inputs in place, we will accredit the capacity to run credible practice: supervision ratios, safety protocols, assessment standards, evidence of learning.
Modules will carry sunset clauses to prevent the timetable from becoming a museum. A course redesigned with a hospital or a city agency will be evaluated as scholarship, even if it does not produce a journal article on a list we did not draft. We will still love journals; we will add pride of place for those who build the circuits through which knowledge travels back changed.
The AI era sharpens rather than softens our obligation to practice. If ‘what to know’ is increasingly available at the speed of a prompt, our value shifts to ‘what to do next’: framing problems, interrogating models, auditing failures, building systems that survive contact with users.
We are joining regional compute cooperatives and curating data commons in health, agriculture, logistics, and linguistics so that the most interesting questions about our world can be asked and answered here. Practice becomes the laboratory in which students and faculty test models against reality – and reality, obligingly, argues back.
There is a policy dimension we cannot pretend away. The state can convert our current struggle into a workable regime with a shortlist of boring but decisive instruments: a pooled insurance scheme for work-integrated learning; tax incentives or procurement points for firms that host students in accredited programmes; visas within regional blocs that treat students and supervisors as routine academic traffic rather than suspicious travellers; funding formulas that recognise practice costs as core, not peripheral. We are making these requests in writing and in public so that promises can be measured in timetables, not in speeches.
Employers must become co-builders
Employers must decide whether to remain critics at the far bank or to become co-builders. We are inviting them into multiyear compacts that name numbers, not sentiments: how many students, in which months, supervised by whom, assessed how, with feedback that we promise to convert into curriculum revisions on a predictable cycle.
We will bring students who arrive prepared, we will protect their time and dignity, and we will take responsibility for grading. In return, we ask for doors that open and for supervisors who see teaching as part of their craft, not as charity.
If this all sounds procedural, it is because bridges are built of schedules, standards and people who can be relied upon on Thursday afternoon.
We will continue to honour the lecture hall and the lab because ideas matter. We will also honour the loading dock, the clinic corridor, the district office, the cooperative’s packing shed, and the control room where someone keeps the lights on, despite the weather. These are classrooms, too.
We are done pretending that employability is a week of mock interviews. We are done enrolling students into degrees that cannot guarantee a minimum of practice and then comforting ourselves with rhetoric about resilience.
We will admit with honesty, teach with proximity, assess with seriousness, and partner with those willing to share risk. The printer will still jam on the morning a report is due; the grid will still flicker just before an upload; a supervisor will still forget a meeting.
But our students will not be standing at the balustrade watching opportunities rush by. They will be on a bridge that extends as they walk – sometimes shaky, often demanding, and increasingly connected to solid ground on the other side.
And we, an African university, will have remembered that our vocation is, not only to know the world, but to prepare people to change it without waiting for the river to slow.