Reaching the Unreached: KCA University Takes Africa’s Case for Open & Distance Learning to Beijing

The Vice Chancellor & CEO, Prof. Isaiah I. C. Wakindiki PhD., EBS represented KCA University at the 2026 Annual Conference of the China–Africa Consortium of Universities Exchange Mechanism (CACU), held on 19–20 September 2026 at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Joined by Prof. Vincent Onywera, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research, Innovation and Outreach, Prof. Wakindiki delivered a keynote address on “Reaching the Unreached Through Education”, setting out an argument that Africa’s higher education systems can no longer avoid.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s gross tertiary enrolment ratio stands at nine per cent, against a global average of forty-three. Between 2020 and 2040, UNESCO projects that the number of young Africans completing secondary or tertiary education will more than double, from 103 million to 240 million. Today, the entire sub-Saharan region teaches approximately nine million tertiary students. Prof. Wakindiki’s argument was that no country, on any continent, has ever built physical campuses fast enough to absorb growth of that scale. The constraint is not ambition or ability. It is the construction cycle itself: land, buildings, laboratories and resident faculty take years, while the students arrive in millions, and they arrive now.

Since 1979, the Open University of China has enrolled 25.72 million students and graduated 19.61 million, through forty-four provincial open universities and close to four thousand local learning centres. Its “One College Student per Village” initiative, launched in 2004, enrolled over a million rural residents and received the UNESCO Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education in 2020. Africa, in turn, brings conditions no other system has had to design for: thirty-six per cent internet penetration, intermittent power, multiple languages of instruction and a mobile-first learner. A system built to work under those constraints, the Vice-Chancellor argued, will work anywhere.

KCA University’s participation in CACU sits within the wider continental structure. CACU was established under a 2022 memorandum of understanding between the Association of African Universities and the China Association of Higher Education, providing for regular cooperation, annual strategic meetings, a joint China–Africa research network and postgraduate scholarships for African students in China.

As a member university of CACU, KCA University continues to pursue global partnerships that are co-designed, co-invested and co-owned — and that extend the reach of higher education to learners who have, until now, been left outside it.