A student walks into my office on a Friday morning. She is a third-year Economics student bright, committed, the kind of young person you picture when you imagine the future of this continent. She is also asking to withdraw from the University with a 1.69 CGPA.
Not because she lacks intellectual ability. Not because she is disengaged. But because she is overwhelmed, disappointed in herself, financially stretched, academically behind after a family emergency, and too proud or perhaps too exhausted to figure out which door to knock on first.
That moment, repeated in different forms across our campuses every single week, crystalises the central challenge of student support in African higher education today. The question is not whether we care about our students. We do. The question is whether our institutions are organised to show it.
At the University of Ghana, Ghana’s oldest and most storied university we carry both the pride of our legacy and the weight of our reality. We serve seventy thousand students. We operate with budgets that do not expand as fast as our enrolment. We work with staff who are, frankly, doing the work of several people at once. And yet, year after year, students graduate transformed, resilient, and ready. How? Not through resources alone. Through people working together, deliberately and with purpose.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African proverb
In student support, going far is the only option.
The Myth of the Single-Office Solution
There is a persistent institutional fantasy encountered in strategy documents across the continent that student support can be solved by creating the right office. Build a student services centre. Hire an academic advisory officer. Place a help desk. Problem solved.
It is a myth. And an expensive one.
The challenges facing students today are not single-domain problems. When a student is struggling academically, there is almost always something else happening behind the scenes financial pressure, health concerns, family obligations, a crisis of belonging, or the quiet mental health challenges that too many young Africans are only now beginning to name out loud. A single office, no matter how well-resourced, cannot hold all of that.
What can hold it is a team. A genuine, coordinated, cross-functional team that treats student well-being as a shared responsibility rather than somebody else’s department.
At the University of Ghana, this is not a theoretical position it is operational reality. Our faculty and staff departmental academic advisors, central and college academic affairs officers, IT teams, careers and counselling professionals, UGSRC and GRASAG peer guides, deans, hall masters, and tutors are not parallel entities. They are, when at their best, an interlocking support mechanism, each playing a distinct but connected role in keeping students on track.
What African Context Demands
I want to be deliberate here, because context matters enormously in this conversation.
Western models of student support were designed for Western student profiles largely residential, largely independent of family financial systems, largely supported by robust government funding or institutional endowments. Our students, in many cases, carry very different realities.
A significant proportion of University of Ghana students are the first in their families to attend university. Many are working to pay their own fees while also contributing financially to their households. Many commute long distances. Many carry the heavy weight of community expectations that transform personal academic failure into collective family shame.
They are not defined by their struggles. These students bring extraordinary resilience, communal intelligence, and purpose to everything they do. But it means our support systems must be designed with these realities in mind not borrowed wholesale from institutions operating in entirely different contexts.
Ubuntu “I am because we are” is not a marketing slogan for our institutions. It is a philosophy that, properly translated into institutional design, makes us genuinely better at caring for students than systems built on individualism ever could be.
When we convene a multi-disciplinary team around a struggling student, we are not just following a case management protocol. We are living Ubuntu. We are saying: your success is not yours alone to carry. We carry it with you.
Leadership: The Variable That Changes Everything
Our well-intentioned student support frameworks have failed now and then not because the framework was wrong, but because of weakness in leadership. Teamwork in student support requires leaders, at every level, who actively model collaboration rather than protect territory.
In my role as Director of Academic Affairs, I have come to understand that my most important function is not to make decisions in a vacuum. It is to create the conditions under which the right people make decisions together. That means opening communication lines and structures. It means cross-departmental meetings that are not ceremonial but genuinely action-oriented. It means holding people accountable not just for their own KPIs, but for their contribution to shared student outcomes.
Leadership in this context also means managing the cultural resistance to collaboration. In university environments, there is often a professional hierarchy that discourages junior staff from raising concerns, prizes individual expertise over collective intelligence, and treats referrals to other departments as admissions of failure rather than signs of professional maturity.
Breaking that culture requires leaders who are visible, consistent, and credible. It requires the courage to name dysfunction when it exists the student fell through the gap not because no one cared, but because two departments each assumed the other was handling it, and no one followed through.
At the University of Ghana, we are building that culture imperfectly but deliberately. Our digital graduation system is being enhanced into an alert mechanism through which academic departments can flag at-risk students and initiate coordinated follow-up. That culture will not emerge naturally. It has to be led into existence.
Digital Transformation: Our Multiplier
Let me be candid: when people hear “digital transformation” in the context of an African university, they sometimes picture a conversation happening somewhere else in well-funded institutions in Europe or North America. That skepticism is understandable. But it is no longer entirely accurate.
At the University of Ghana, digital tools are not a luxury we are aspiring toward. They are already reshaping how we support students and they are the primary mechanism through which we scale teamwork beyond what human bandwidth alone could achieve.
Our communication systems allow senior management, advisors, faculty, and support staff to log concerns, share notes, and track interventions in real time. WhatsApp and other messaging platforms sometimes dismissed as informal have become critical conduits for real-time coordination between staff. Our online portals have extended access to academic guidance beyond office hours, reaching students who commute, who work, who simply cannot wait until Monday’s office hours.
None of this replaces human connection. Digital transformation in student support is not about automation. It is about amplification. It amplifies the reach of a skilled advisor. It removes friction from the referral process. It means that when a student submits a request at 10pm on a Saturday, the system is open to reaching an official in a timeframe that actually helps.
The digital divide is real, and we must not pretend otherwise. Not every student has reliable internet access. Not every staff member has received adequate training. These are not excuses to delay digital investment they are design parameters that demand we build systems that are accessible, low-bandwidth where necessary, and accompanied by genuine capacity-building.
The Economics of Teamwork
There is a pragmatic argument I want to make to every university leader reading this because the idealistic argument, though I believe in it, does not always win budget hearings.
Effective teamwork in student support is cheaper than the alternative.
When a student endures a damaging educational experience, the institution loses an advocate. When a student drops out, the institution loses tuition revenue, the administrative costs that come with attrition, and forfeits the long-term reputational gains of a future graduate who might have given back as a donor, employer, or champion.
Most tragically, the student loses years of hard-won progress toward a qualification that was almost theirs.
Early, coordinated intervention delivered by a team that communicates well and acts quickly is dramatically more cost-effective than the downstream consequences of students slipping through the cracks undetected. One well-timed conversation between an advisor and a faculty member, leading to a referral to financial aid, can keep a student enrolled. That conversation costs nothing except the institutional culture that makes it possible.
Investing in collaborative student support teams is not a welfare expense. It is a strategic investment in our core business: producing graduates who are transformed, supported, and ready.
What I Ask of Us
As I reflect on where we are and where we must go, I want to issue a call to my colleagues at the University of Ghana, and to higher education leaders across this continent.. Do not wait for the budget to grow, the new building to open, or the international partnership to materialise. Start with who you have. Convene the advisor, the faculty member, the health services director, the financial aid officer put them on the same platform, give them a shared focus, and ask them to work on the same student, solving issues together.
Invest in leadership that values collaboration. Promote and celebrate staff who break silos. Create accountability structures that track student outcomes, not just departmental outputs.
Embrace digital tools thoughtfully, contextually, with eyes open to the gaps as a way of making your teams more effective, more connected, and more capable of reaching every student, not just the ones who find their way to the right office at the right time.
And hold fast to the philosophy that our cultures have always known: that no one succeeds alone and that the student in front of us is someone’s daughter, her community’s hope, her nation’s future. She deserves the full weight of every resource, relationship, and capability we can bring to bear on her success.
💬 Let’s Work Together
One hand, the elders say, cannot wash itself. Yet in our institutions, we often fall for the myth of the single-office solution hoping one department, or someone else, can fix challenges that are deeply interconnected.
If we agree that student success is truly a shared responsibility, then we must ask: Who is the “other hand” in your work?
I want to hear from you:
- What is the biggest “silo” you’ve encountered in higher education and how did you break through it to help a student?
- Have you seen a digital tool even something as simple as WhatsApp successfully bridge a gap between units?
- Tag a colleague who has been the “other hand” for you this semester.
We are each other’s hands. Let’s act like it. 🌍
Lydia Anowa Nyako-Danquah Director, Academic Affairs & Deputy Registrar | University of Ghana, Legon
I write in a personal capacity on matters of higher education leadership, student support, and institutional transformation.