Advancing Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship through Postgraduate Education in East Africa

ongoing

The ADVANCE project is implemented by a consortium of 10 partner organizations, including 7 universities – 2 in Uganda, 2 in Tanzania, and 3 in Europe, joined by 3 non-academic partners – an NGO from Uganda, a business development organization from Tanzania and an education & research centre from Bulgaria. The overall objective of our project is to enhance social innovation and entrepreneurship in Uganda and Tanzania by developing and implementing a new competence-based Post-Graduate Diploma programme in four universities in the partner countries, in cooperation with local stakeholders and based on the methodologies of service-learning and experiential learning. The project focuses on enabling transition from a theoretical teaching of entrepreneurship to experiential learning, deeply connected to community service, that fosters entrepreneurial competences of learners, needed for the establishment, management and scaling of mission-led enterprises offering innovative solutions to social and environmental challenges. As a result of the project, the PC HEIs will develop, accredit, introduce and implement a post-graduate diploma programme in social innovation and entrepreneurship (30 ECTS) with min. 165 students enrolled in its first edition. In order to achieve it, the project will support the development of a Competence Profile of a Social Entrepreneur in East Africa, Curriculum and learning content (incl. video materials), and a new quality management system facilitating quality assurance of competence-based study programmes. The project will also support the establishment of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Learning Centres at PC HEIs, and will train a cohort of lecturers (min. 79) and mentors (min. 68) for the implementation of the programme. Our ambition is for PC HEIs to have min. 150 graduates of the programme on annual basis, min. 30% of whom launch and successfully operate a social enterprise within three years of graduation.