Richard Adarkwah and Joy Lamptey, the Regional Manager and the Student Success Manager for Brighter Investment in Ghana, are interviewed on AAU Talks about financing higher education in Africa. The Association of African Universities (AAU) is the official African Union body representing all higher education institutions within that Union. The full 50 minute interview can be found on the AAU Facebook page and is definitely worth a watch. But if you’re short on time, here are our 6 favorite parts.

The Brighter Investment model, an investment in a student's higher education in return for a % of their future income, naturally results in a focus on the brightest students pursuing the degree programs with the best career potential. The consequence of this focus on career potential and income, is that the majority of degrees Brighter Investment supports are programs in science, technology, engineering, medicine as well as certain business and finance degrees. Degrees in art and the humanities are examples of areas that we currently don’t support students in. Why not? And should that change?

In our recent blog posts we dove into how our student investment model works and we presented metrics that show that it actually works. We also answered the most frequently asked questions except for one, a very simple one: why? Why have the people on our team decided to do this? And what do we ultimately hope to achieve with Brighter Investment?

Society is changing at an unprecedented pace. Today, self-driving cars and phones that schedule hair appointments are no longer fiction, but reality. An estimated 6 billion people now have access to cellphones (whereas 4.5 billion have access to toilets). Given the way technology is transforming society, it is natural to wonder: What will the future of higher education look like? Does the rise of massive open online courses mean the end of traditional universities?

The New Patriotic Party, presided by Nana Akuffo Addo, is the majority ruling party in Ghana as of January 2017. The main policy objectives with regards to education are heavily focused on improving teachers’ well being and status, free education for children up to Senior High School, raising the quality of education at primary and senior high school levels with an emphasis on science and technology as well as raising university standards, with a priority in research and innovation. As we will show in this article, these policies will increase the need for Brighter Investment’s program in Ghana as well as help make it more successful.

Reluctance to invest abroad damages portfolios in the long-run, according to research by Goldman Sachs. A more diversified portfolio would cope better with shocks. Jose Usrua, a global economist at the bank, stated that over the last decade capital has remained mostly on home ground. "Over the medium-run, home bias can either be a curse or a blessing, depending on  where shocks originate. Over the long-run, however, high levels of home bias are likely to reveal diversification pitfalls that could be damaging for global investment portfolios."