Lessons from three Transformational Leaders in Ghana’s Higher Education

Unlike universities around the world, many African universities do not routinely overhaul their structures and processes in connection with their changing environments. Challenges of education in general in sub-Saharan Africa include inadequate financial resources, together with unprecedented demand for access, the legacy of colonialism and socioeconomic crises. In an attempt to fill the lacuna, the concept of transformational leadership is adopted as an organising framework to explore how successful African higher education leaders initiate and monitor innovative processes to address the challenges in African tertiary education. There is the need to understand the isolated cases of successful leadership in African higher education in order to understand the practice of successful transformational leadership and related lessons to strengthen African universities. Focusing on Ghana, three leaders of tertiary institutions who have excelled in pulling their universities up from humble beginnings into global renown are interviewed. Running a university in times of national or regional crisis cannot be easy, but each of these leaders persevered and excelled in making great strides towards improving their institutions. Their stories afford us the opportunity to establish broad linkages and draw conclusions that can inform policy towards enhancing higher education in Africa.