True to Gaston Berger’s spirit[1], the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA) regularly develops a forward-looking approach to guide its strategic decisions. By the end of 2025, the question of a global collaboration strategy with Africa emerged as a key issue due to the constraints and growth opportunities that this continent will experience and represent in the coming years.

By the end of 2025, the question of an overall collaboration strategy with Africa became a key topic due to the challenges and opportunities that the continent is expected to face and present in the coming years. So INSA Lyon launched a collective reflection process involving representatives from African universities, young entrepreneurs, players in Franco-African cooperation and internal staff to think together about the factors that might influence the future of higher education and engineering research in Africa by 2050 and to consider what this could mean for INSA Lyon’s partnerships.

The participants came together over two separate sessions which allowed key variables to be identified that will undoubtedly influence higher education and research in Africa in the coming decades. Thus, 11 variables emerged, each analyzed according to 3 development scenarios:

• Institutional governance and regulation

• International partnerships and external dependency

• Demography and massification of higher education

• Funding and economic models of public higher education and research actors

• Labor market, jobs and skills

• Decolonization of knowledge and the place of indigenous knowledge

• Physical infrastructure and equipment

• Living and learning conditions of students

• Teaching staff, course offerings, teaching methods and educational engineering

• Research capacity and scientific output

• Innovation and entrepreneurship.

This work will allow INSA to guide its future collaborations in a way that better takes into account the possible developments of its future African partners to train the engineers of tomorrow.

Pascale Gibert <Pascale.Gibert@insa-lyon.fr>

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[1] For more information on this great philosopher, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Berger  . Let’s remember that he was behind the creation of the many National Institutes of Applied Sciences.

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