Mastercard Funding Anchors Afretec's 2026 Tech Network

Mastercard Foundation core funding and large-scale investment sit at the centre of Afretec’s annual gathering this year, underpinning a pan-African network of ten technology-focused universities. That financial backing framed the 5th Afretec Conference, hosted for the first time by the University of the Witwatersrand from 25 to 29 October 2026, where more than 120 higher education leaders, scholars and students from 10 educational institutions across Africa took stock of what the collaboration has produced.

The network’s economics were hard to avoid. Adrian Bukenya, Senior Director, Scholars Program at the Mastercard Foundation, welcomed delegates and argued that African institutions, youth and cross-disciplinary networks must collaborate to build inclusive digital futures. The value of Afretec, he said, lies not only in what each institution delivers, but also in what the network makes possible across the institutions: sharing learning, mobility, joint research, stronger teaching, common platforms, and solutions that travel while remaining responsive to local context. Africa’s inclusive digital future, he added, will not be imported fully; it will be engineered here through African institutions, African evidence, African innovation, and the leadership of Africa’s young people.

Afretec was founded and is led by Carnegie Mellon University Africa in Rwanda, and comprises ten member universities: Carnegie Mellon University Africa (Rwanda), Addis Ababa Science and Technology University (Ethiopia), the 10th and newest partner Agostinho Neto University (Angola), Al Akhawayn University (Morocco), The American University in Cairo (Egypt), Université Cheikh Anta Diop (Senegal), University of Lagos (Nigeria), University of Nairobi (Kenya), University of Rwanda (Rwanda), and the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). The network meets annually to strengthen cross-country and cross-institutional collaboration in support of the inclusive digital growth of the continent.

The returns on that investment featured prominently in the opening address by Professor Nithaya Chetty, Dean of the Wits Faculty of Science. He described Afretec as a visionary initiative that has begun to bear incredible fruit and great accomplishments, commending the partnerships fostered and underlining the importance of digital technologies to strengthen Africa’s research and innovation capacity. Among those accomplishments, Wits has established a flexible-admissions Data Science Diploma that produced a majority female bursary cohort without any gender-based criterion, a result significant enough to prompt a review of admissions policy for other graduate programmes.

What changed: fundraising itself became a formal agenda item, reflecting the funding realities behind such networks. The five-day programme included a panel discussion on building fundraising capacity that works, chaired by Pamela Agar, Co-Executive Director of Europe for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). The panel drew on shared lessons from African institutions that have successfully built fundraising programmes, highlighting success factors, challenges, and adaptable approaches that can help institutions strengthen their advancement and fundraising capacity.

Professor Tim Brown, Director of CMU-Africa, offered the network’s founding logic in his opening remarks: Afretec started from a simple notion that Africa’s digital transformation will be driven by engineers and technologists, and that for transformation to succeed, Africa needs to train them to be technology leaders who can lead the teams, provide skilled technical capacity and who can get the job done.

Meanwhile, the host institution’s own stake in the network was clear. Professor Heila Jordaan, Wits University’s project leader at Afretec and organiser of the conference, said Afretec has made significant progress. It has matured as a network and is doing very important work across the continent in terms of developing the digital economy, she said. This was the first time Wits has hosted the conference, and Jordaan said it was most rewarding to hear from participants expressing appreciation and absolute awe about Wits. As a proud Witsie, this makes me very happy, she said.

She also commended the Wits leadership, including Professors Ruksana Osman, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, and Chetty, who supported her in working with Afretec to make the conference a success. It was very important for Afretec participants to experience Wits as a partner and as a world-class university, she said, noting that this certainly came across very clearly.

Further coverage of the conference is available at https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2026/2026-11/afretec-conference-2026-fosters-stronger-collaboration.html. Whether the network’s next annual gathering turns its fundraising lessons into new revenue streams for its ten member universities remains the open question for investors in African higher education to watch.