The Green Transition Will fail if African Universities Do Not Redesign Programmes Now
In most institutions, climate change and sustainability are still treated as specialist concerns, placed inside environmental science departments, writes Fulufhelo Nemavhola
Africa’s green transition will not be won by policy ambition alone. It will depend on whether universities can redesign what they teach, how they teach, and whom they prepare for a rapidly changing economy.
Africa’s green transition is often discussed as if it were mainly an energy issue. It is not. It is also an education issue, a labour market issue, and a development issue. If universities continue to teach for yesterday’s economy while governments and industries speak about decarbonisation, resilience and sustainable growth, the transition will eventually run into a skills wall.
That is the problem; higher education is still not confronting the issue with enough urgency.
Across the continent, public debate about the green transition usually focuses on renewable energy, climate finance, industrial policy and emissions targets. These are important. But one of the biggest bottlenecks lies elsewhere: in the curriculum.
A country can adopt ambitious environmental goals, build green policy frameworks and attract investment into cleaner sectors. Yet if its universities continue to graduate students from programmes designed for a more siloed, more carbon-intensive and less interconnected economy, the transition will be slowed not by a lack of vision, but by a lack of capability.
This is where many universities remain behind the times.
In most institutions, climate change and sustainability are still treated as specialist concerns. They are placed inside environmental science departments, isolated centres or a few optional electives.
That response may once have appeared adequate. It is no longer enough. The green transition is not a niche topic to be added at the margins of existing programmes. It is a structural reorganisation of economies, labour markets, public systems and infrastructure priorities. That means higher education cannot continue treating it as a side issue. It must reshape what students learn, how knowledge is organised and how different fields are connected.
At present, most universities are not designed for that task.
They are still built around disciplinary boundaries that make administrative sense but make less and less sense in the real world. Engineering sits in one place, environmental science in another, economics elsewhere, and public policy somewhere else again.
But the green transition does not happen in disciplinary boxes. Real transition problems arrive as systems problems. Energy is linked to infrastructure. Water is linked to planning. Climate is linked to health. Industrial policy is linked to finance, logistics, materials and regulation. African universities still separate these worlds far more neatly than reality does.
That matters because the green transition is not only creating a few new occupations. It is changing the knowledge demands of existing ones. Engineers now need to understand resilience, lifecycle design, emissions constraints and circular production. Commerce graduates need to understand transition finance, risk disclosure and changing supply chains.
Public administrators need to consider energy governance, adaptation planning, and infrastructure stress. Health professionals will increasingly confront the service burdens caused by environmental disruption. Even where the job title remains the same, the work is changing.
Yet universities often continue to act as though the answer lies in producing more specialists, rather than more connected thinkers. The problem is not depth. The problem is depth without integration.
A graduate may leave university with strong technical competence in a narrow field and still be poorly prepared for the practical realities of transition. A future engineer may understand the mechanics of a system without understanding the policy, social and ecological context in which that system must now operate.
A future policymaker may understand climate frameworks without understanding implementation constraints. A business graduate may understand strategy but not how climate risk and green industrial restructuring are reshaping the economy. In all these cases, disciplinary knowledge remains important, but on its own it is no longer enough.
The real danger is that universities are still teaching for an economy that is disappearing while claiming to prepare students for the one that is emerging.
Part of the problem is institutional inertia. Universities are built for continuity. Programme approval systems are slow. Academic departments protect their boundaries. Accreditation systems can become cautious.
Curriculum change is often treated as a routine review exercise rather than an urgent strategic responsibility. What may once have been defensible is now becoming increasingly irresponsible.
If labour markets are being reshaped by electrification, adaptation, circular production, energy-system change and green industrial policy, then higher education must respond at a similar speed. Otherwise, institutions will continue producing graduates whose knowledge maps poorly onto the demands of the future.
So what would a serious redesign look like?
First, universities must stop treating climate relevance as the responsibility of specialist units alone. Every programme should ask how transition pressures are reshaping its field. This does not mean turning every qualification into an environmental degree. It means accepting that sustainability, resilience and resource pressures are now basic conditions of professional practice across multiple sectors.
Second, universities need to design programmes that integrate systems thinking with disciplinary mastery. The green transition requires graduates who can work across boundaries: between engineering and policy, finance and infrastructure, technology and inequality, science and implementation. The aim is not to weaken expertise, but to make expertise more usable.
Third, applied learning must move to the centre. The green transition will be won or lost in municipalities, utilities, transport systems, farms, factories, clinics and public agencies. Students should not encounter sustainability only through concepts and policy language. They should work on real problems in real contexts. A curriculum that does not connect knowledge to implementation will always lag behind the reality it claims to address.
Fourth, universities need more flexible programme architectures. Africa’s green transition will not be driven only by school-leavers entering traditional three- or four-year qualifications. Mid-career workers will need reskilling.
Professionals will need targeted upgrading. Technicians and practitioners will need stackable, shorter learning formats. Institutions that remain tied solely to long, front-loaded qualifications will struggle to keep pace with and respond to the unevenness of change across sectors and regions.
Finally, internal incentives must change. As long as universities reward research output far more reliably than curriculum innovation, and administrative compliance more readily than external responsiveness, redesign will remain too slow. University leaders must begin to treat curriculum reform as a strategic priority, not as academic housekeeping.
This matters especially in Africa because the continent cannot afford a green transition that is rhetorically ambitious but institutionally thin. Africa needs more climate discourse.
It needs engineers who can build resilient systems, planners who understand sustainable settlements, health professionals who can respond to climate-linked stress, entrepreneurs who can grow green industries, and graduates across fields who can work with complexity rather than inside narrow academic compartments.
The green transition will not fail because there are too few conferences, declarations or speeches. It will fail if the institutions responsible for preparing the next generation continue to move too slowly, teach too narrowly and preserve boundaries that the real world has already outgrown.
The university curriculum is no longer a matter of background. It is part of the transition infrastructure itself.
And if African universities do not redesign it now, it may become one of the main reasons the transition falls short.
Fulufhelo Nemavhola is a Deputy Vice Chancellor at the Durban University of Technology, and he writes in his personal capacity.
©Higher Education Media Services.