By Dr Stephen Akandwanaho, Executive Dean: Faculty of IT at Richfield
There is a massive disconnect that fundamentally exists within African business education today. The classic MBA was built for markets driven by rough equilibrium and modest change. Yet Africa’s growth and expansion are occurring amid persistent turbulence, enduring imbalances, intersecting intricate systems, and a collective drive for home-grown intellectual and technological power. An innovative African MBA must disrupt the culture of business schools, shifting from mimicking non-African models to inventing frameworks that speak to the nature of markets and economies across the continent.
The VACS (Volatility, Asymmetry, Constructive complexity, Sovereignty) framework provides a new paradigm for what a forward-looking, relevant MBA should embody in shaping the next generation of leadership, while positioning itself as an engine for transformation and growth.
Volatility
Leaders operate in stressful environments, locally and globally. Opportunity and pressure now sit side by side. According to Disrupt Africa’s biennial report, Finnovating for Africa 2023, African fintechs secured over $2.7 billion between July 2021 and June 2023, despite macro headwinds. The graduate who flourishes here understands how to steady strategy amid turbulence and to see advantage in shocks. Volatility literacy must be a core learning outcome, i.e. train for disciplined experiments, decisions that are fast without being reckless, and for firms that survive the rough weeks as well as the good ones.
Asymmetry
Africa’s markets remain uneven by design. A mechanic in a township orders spare parts through a voice-message app while a corporate fleet captain monitors predictive-maintenance dashboards.
These contrasts are not contradictions to be reconciled; they are the contours of everyday commerce. Most African startups fail not because the ideas are weak, but because management practices are fragile and systems are flimsy. In South Africa, the informal sector is a lifeline for 19.8% of the workforce, even though it contributes only 6% to gross domestic product (GDP). Leaders must build durable, disciplined firms that honour both the formal and informal by designing systems that fit how value is created and exchanged on the ground.
Constructive complexity
Africa is not simply complicated; it is complex in a way that holds opportunity if you can decipher the dynamics. The legacy MBA slices the world into functional modules and brings integration at the end. The African MBA must integrate from day one. It should fuse systems thinking with public policy, ethics with machine learning, and grassroots livelihood decisions with macroeconomic strategy. Assessments should centre on synthesis and judgement in contexts of uncertainty, not only on tidy answers after the fact.
Sovereignty
If we keep importing models, we will keep exporting talent. Sovereignty is not isolation; it is the capacity to set our own questions, source our own data, and design frameworks for our conditions while staying globally fluent.
That begins with case production rooted in African firms and public institutions, and it extends to digital sovereignty – who owns the data and platforms that shape decisions in our banks, hospitals, retailers, and courts. Much of Africa’s online content continues to be hosted outside the continent, a challenge highlighted by the Internet Society’s 80/20 Initiative, which called for 80% of African internet traffic to be locally accessible by 2020. At the same time, Africa’s internet economy is on track to contribute $180 billion, reaching 5.2% of the continent’s GDP by 2025. An MBA that treats technology as an elective is already behind; governance and use of digital systems must be embedded.
Why this matters now
The MBA remains in demand, but not the old kind. Employers still value the qualification, and four out of five expect demand to rise over the next five years. That does not sanction inertia. It raises the bar: graduates must be commercially astute, digitally fluent, and context-aware by being able to decide with incomplete information, build calm teams under pressure, and turn messy problems into plans others can follow.
What the next African MBA should deliver
The African MBA must prepare leaders for an era in which guiding an enterprise means mastering human dynamics and algorithmic frameworks together. Cases should be ours. Project work should be attached to real enterprises solving African problems. Technology should not live in a lab down the hall; it should sit inside finance, marketing, operations, and strategy.
Above all, programmes should embed systems thinking and digital fluency, and assessments should reward good judgement under pressure. Success cannot be judged by salary uplift alone. We should ask what changes in government, business, and society follow: resilient firms built and sustained, good jobs created and protected, and public services improved because people who understand tech, finance, and policy sat at the same table and solved the same problem.
None of this rejects the best of global practice. It builds on it. It stops copying and starts creating. It treats volatility as normal, asymmetry as a design brief, complexity as an integrated task, and sovereignty as a responsibility.
That is the MBA Africa needs next. At Richfield, we have taken that brief seriously in structuring a tech-driven MBA that brings modern technology and business management together from day one. It is one step in a larger shift, but it shows what becomes possible when a programme is built for the place it serves.
