Honoris United Universities - New Higher Education Options For Africa
A group of students attending a graduation ceremony within the Honoris United Universities Network, ... More which includes over 100,000 students in 76 campuses across several countries in Africa.
The Emerging Market for African Higher Education
Africa is the youngest continent in the world, with a median age of 19.2 years, and over 1.5 billion people. Its population growth makes it an engine of future global economic expansion, and by 2045, Africa will be home to over 25% of the world's population. Large public universities have struggled to meet demand, and in many cases, the most talented young people move abroad for their education. Currently Africa sends 430,000 students abroad for higher education, and these numbers are expected to double by 2050. Many of the students educated abroad leave the continent permanently, reducing opportunities for economic growth. With the public sector straining to meet the demand for higher education, new private institutions are needed. This opportunity has opened the way for a new entity, the Honoris United Universities, to help unite and expand opportunities for African universities to meet the moment.
The Founding and Growth of Honoris United Universities
Honoris United Universities is the first and largest pan-African private higher education network, committed to transforming lives through relevant, high-quality education. Officially launched in 2017, the network was built on the principle of 'collaborative intelligence' and has since grown to encompass sixteen institutions across ten African countries and thirty-two cities. Honoris Group CEO Dr. Jonathan Louw is uniquely positioned to lead the network, as his career spans medicine, business, and private equity. After beginning his career as a physician in South Africa and working in the UK, he returned to South Africa to earn his MBA. Louw subsequentially ascended the corporate ranks at AstraZeneca and Adcock Ingram/Tiger Brands, eventually working in private equity, focusing on hospital networks in North Africa. He later managed the South African National Blood Service, which used drones to move blood samples quickly through rural areas and worked with thousands of staff at 190 sites across the nation.
Honoris has crafted a unique model that balances financial sustainability with academic excellence through a shared management culture and a commitment to key performance indicators (KPIs). CEO Jonathan Louw notes that 'There's certain KPIs that are non-negotiable' such as 'keeping the student at the center.' These KPIs include employability and graduate outcomes, student satisfaction, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) standards, academic quality and research impact. Honoris encourages peer competition among its institutions to foster excellence. 'Institutions competing about the quality of the institutions just leads to better outcomes,' says Louw, who notes that 'we would not subscribe to any reduction in quality of our academics at any stage.'
Lessons from Medicine to build a for-profit Higher Education Network
Louw notes that the model of a private, for-profit higher education network has been successfully implemented in healthcare, citing South African hospital groups as examples, and concluding 'if you look at some of the large South African conglomerates and private hospital groups … those are a proxy for what Honoris is doing in Africa.' Louw believes Africa is poised to become a global talent hub but lacks the capacity found in Europe and the US, 'In many parts of the world, access to high-quality education often comes at a significant financial cost. In Africa, however, only a small proportion of students, estimated between one in eight and one in twelve, currently have access to quality higher education. We are working to bridge this gap by widening access for the emerging middle class, offering high-quality, future-focused degrees and courses at an accessible fee that delivers high return on investment for students and their families.' The result is a network that enrolls over 100,000 students who have has succeeded in 'transforming 1.2 million lives,' he continues.
The Honoris Management Philosophy – Bringing Entrepreneurial Energy to Academia
The Honoris network provides many opportunities to showcase innovation and best practices, including its own academic conferences. Laura Kakon, Group Chief Growth & Strategy Officer, says that Honoris is inspired by 'the African ubuntu, 'I am because we are' and states that Honoris 'creates something that has more impact and more value than if each of the institutions is doing it alone.' The HUU culture includes systems for sharing best practices and fostering innovation, and Kakon notes that 'having a common strategic framework helps to raise the quality but also helps the institutions to benchmark against one another.'
Honoris continuously adapts its curriculum to ensure that graduates possess job-relevant skills. As Louw explains, the network encourages major employers to 'partner with us and actually modify the curriculum so that the outcomes for internships and engagement with that student later on are so much better.' Honoris supports entrepreneurial initiatives and technological advancements, AI-driven education solutions including adaptive learning systems, and virtual reality tools to enhance learning experiences. Louw states, 'When leaders and faculty across our network bring forward innovative ideas, whether in artificial intelligence, the launch of new creative disciplines, or pioneering approaches like adaptive learning, we use these as powerful opportunities to transform how education is delivered and experienced.' The network is designed to 'deeply empower each of the institutions' and 'make sure that they remain entrepreneurial.' He describes the Honoris philosophy as 'test and fail or test and scale.'
Honoris began in Tunisia and Morocco, the center of French-speaking Africa. Many of the best private universities in both countries are now within the Honoris United Universities Network. Among them, ESPRIT in Tunisia and EMSI in Morocco provide interesting case studies of the interplay between entrepreneurial spirit and the need for new educational models that are typical of the network.
Tahar Ben Lakhdar and the Founding of ESPRIT
Tahar Ben Lakhdar co-founded ESPRIT Tunisia in 2003. He believed in experiential learning as a core principle of engineering education and established ESPRIT with only a few thousand dollars and a group of faculty intent on creating a university from scratch. Ben Lakhdar personally supervised the building of the campus, and to save money, the ESPRIT founders and students made their own furniture and purchased surplus equipment for labs students would repair as part of their training. Eventually ESPRIT grew to become one of the top engineering schools in Tunisia, occupying 10 buildings and hosting a residential campus for 600 students, and capacity for over 13,000 engineering and 3000 business students. ESPRIT joined Honoris in 2020 and has become a leading institution within another network as well, the CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate) consortium. CDIO is based on engineering education ideas pioneered at MIT and ESPRIT hosted the 2024 international CDIO conference. ESPRIT students also regularly win prizes at the Africa in Silicon Valley (A2SV) competition, which brings together over 1000 teams from across the continent to solve Africa's challenges.
The Establishment of EMSI
The École Marocaine des Sciences de l'Ingénieur (EMSI) was founded in 1986, making it Morocco's first private engineering school to receive state recognition. Strong industry-university partnerships, with Oracle University and the pharmaceutical company SOTHEMA, provide students with internationally recognized certifications and hands-on learning. EMSI also established SMARTiLab, an innovation center fostering research on emerging technologies. After joining the Honoris network in 2018, EMSI developed a '21st Century Skills Certificate' designed around the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to foster cognitive agility for students to adapt to rapidly advancing technologies, including artificial intelligence.
The Future of Honoris United Universities
With success stories like ESPRIT in Tunisia or EMSI in Morocco, the Honoris United Universities network has established its value. Louw agrees but adds, "There remains significant room for growth in the education sector, particularly in expanding access to quality learning opportunities. As governments navigate complex challenges from administrative capacity to affordability constraints, the private sector has an important role to play in complementing public efforts by offering innovative, high-quality education solutions that are both accessible and affordable.' With the future of Africa and the larger world in mind, the Honoris network is working to meet this demand.
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