Collaborating across continents: The challenges of intercontinental academic partnerships

In the current climate of concern about the immigrant crisis, and the need for ways of bringing the African peoples to develop their talents and their countries, the graduate business school ALTIS in Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore has been implementing innovative forms of transnational education on social entrepreneurship in Africa since 2010. Although transnational education is a strategy of internationalisation, defined as “an ongoing process of change whose objective is to integrate the institution and its key stakeholders (its students and faculty) into the emerging global knowledge economy” (Hawawini, 2016: 5), transnational education is sometimes seen as a means of enabling Western universities to raise the revenue that is lacking at home. What started as an MBA in Social Entrepreneurship, developed by ALTIS and its spinoff foundation E4Impact, has blossomed into a portfolio of academic opportunities, which adapt to different countries, languages and cultures, while maintaining the core quality content. The MBA, or a lighter form leading to a Certificate, is currently delivered in English or French in nine countries: Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and in 2020 will start in three more countries, Cameroon, Nigeria and, in Portuguese, in Mozambique. Conceived as a partnership between an African university, whose faculty work together with the Italian professors for national accreditation and marketing, the model has had to adapt to diverse contexts, different universities requiring different models, such as a two-year degree or an intensive six-month certificate. The Italian university is thus not exporting a monolithic model, but is offering a collaborative educational proposal, which trains the future generation of international entrepreneurs together. This chapter problematizes the philosophy, methodology and challenges of introducing such programs transnationally, where financial gain is necessary for the creation of a sustainable model, rather than being the primary goal; through case studies, it reports on the impact of the MBA in different countries.