The Africa, Business and Society project
13-04-26
“The world of business is moving faster than what we teach in our lecture rooms. We need to rethink business education and present multidimensional perspectives in our teaching,” says Professor Lindsay Whitfield, project coordinator of the Africa, Business and Society project.
By Vibeke Quaade
When Denmark launched the Knowledge and Innovation Programme in June 2025, curiosity spread quickly in academic circles. What exactly was this new funding initiative – and what might universities do with it?
At Copenhagen Business School (CBS), a group of researchers – four professors and three associate professors – saw it as more than just another grant opportunity. For them, it was a chance to tackle a problem they had been encountering for years in their research and teaching – the dominance of western perspectives in business education.
“We have worked in international contexts for many years, particularly with colleagues at African universities,” says Professor Lindsay Whitfield, from the Centre for Business and Development Studies at CBS, who coordinates the Africa, Business and Society project.
“Again and again, we’d come across the same issue – a bias in the theoretical material that underpins both our research and our teaching.”
So, when the programme was announced, they quickly reached out to long-standing collaborators and colleagues at three African universities, the University of Ghana, the University of Nairobi and the University of Johannesburg, who they knew had encountered the same challenge from different angles.
“With a tight deadline, we had to move quickly,” Whitfield explains, “and because we already had strong partnerships, we were able to come together and design a project that addressed a problem we had all experienced.”
The result became the Africa, Business and Society (ABS) project, funded through Denmark’s Knowledge and Innovation Programme linking CBS and the three African partner universities in a joint effort to rethink how business education is taught across different global contexts.
The northern bias in business education
At the heart of the project lies a critique shared by many scholars, namely that business education generally reflects the assumption that theories developed in western economies apply everywhere.
The bias is not always obvious. In relatively homogeneous academic environments, it can easily go unnoticed, but once researchers begin working internationally – particularly outside their own cultural and economic contexts – the limitations become clear.
“That’s when you start to see that theory does not always match reality, that the original case studies that substantiated the theory have embedded cultural bias,” Whitfield points out.
The imbalance appears in subtle ways: In the literature assigned in courses, in the case studies used in the lecture rooms and in the assumptions embedded in economic theory.
“Most of the academic literature we use in teaching our students is produced in Europe or the US,” she says. “Over time those ideas come to be presented almost as universal truths, even though they are based on very specific historical experiences.”
Here she pauses to make her point absolutely clear, that the aim of the project is not to discard existing theories but to widen the conversation.
“It’s important for me to emphasise that this is not about throwing everything out or claiming that everything is colonial,” she says. “It’s about building a curriculum that better reflects multiple perspectives, encourages debate – and fits the multifaceted world we live in everywhere.”
Lindsay Whitfield´s three tips for potential applicants of Knowledge and Innovation partnership projects
Building partnerships under tight timelines: New collaborations take time to establish trust, so a project has to rely on existing networks.
Clarifying expectations and budgets: Partners sometimes assume that the programme will fund research, so it is very important to communicate carefully and clearly about what can actually be supported. Research cannot be funded under the Knowledge and Innovation partnership projects.
Navigating student recruitment and administration: Admission deadlines, visa applications, and passport issuing processes create logistical hurdles for students coming to Denmark.
Key facts about the African Business Studies project
Project period: 2026 – 2030
Funding: Supported under Denmark’s Knowledge and Innovation Programme with a total grant of DKK 35.9 million / EUR 4.8 million.
Scope: Covers student scholarships in Denmark over three years (including tuition, travel and living costs), curriculum development, joint teaching, and student and faculty mobility across partner institutions.
Participants: Involves 47 African students and 22 academic faculty members from Copenhagen Business School, the University of Ghana, the University of Nairobi and the University of Johannesburg, as well as guest lecturers and collaborators.
When the perspective shapes the answer
Take climate policy for example.
European policymakers often see measures such as carbon border taxes as tools to reduce global emissions. But countries that rely heavily on carbon-intensive exports may see the same policies very differently.
“From a European perspective it looks like a climate solution,” she says, “but in South Africa it can look like a trade barrier that threatens jobs. Neither view is entirely wrong nor entirely right,” she stresses. “The problem arises when only one perspective dominates the discussion. What we want is for all those views to be represented.”
Beyond scholarships
This is why not only the content and modalities, but also the framing of the project matters. If it is presented as simply about bringing African students to Denmark, alarm bells start ringing, raising concerns both in Denmark and in Africa.
A programme recruiting talented students from African universities could easily look like a familiar story – knowledge and talent flowing north.
“We realised very quickly that partnerships wouldn’t work if it sounded like we were saying, send us your best students,” Lindsay Whitfield explains. “That’s not how you build equal collaboration.”
To illustrate her point, she dives into the story of the project’s creation and how reactions varied when the idea was first discussed with partner universities.
“In South Africa the concern was quite strong,” Whitfield says. “People immediately asked whether this would take their best students away, but in Ghana there’s a long tradition of studying in the UK or USA and then returning, so the idea of doing a master’s degree in Europe and coming back didn’t raise the same concerns.”
For all partners, it therefore made sense to push for something more fundamental and create a partnership built around education itself, rather than just student mobility.
This will involve co-developing courses, exchanging lecturers, and creating new teaching materials that reflect a broader range of global perspectives and experiences. At CBS, this initiative will take the form of a redesigned master’s module, Business and the Global South, where African students will be part of the lecture room experience.
A new lecture room dynamic
The presence of students from different parts of the world, Whitfield believes, has the potential to change conversations in the lecture room in unexpected ways.
“Many of our classes are quite homogeneous,” she says. “Even when we have exchange students, they’re mostly European. Having students from African countries in the room may change the perspective.”
Faculty exchanges will also run both ways, with academics from Ghana, South Africa and Kenya teaching at CBS.
“Western academics teaching in African countries used to be quite common decades ago,” she says, “but having our African colleagues come here and teach in our programmes – that’s something quite different.”
Education is more than simply preparing students for jobs
The programme will support around 47 African students over three years, but the organisers hope to see that its influence will reach beyond them.
“Education”, she argues, “has an impact that goes beyond preparing you for the job market. You might teach a student for one semester and then years later they write to tell you that it changed the way they think about the world,” she says. “That’s why education matters.”
She worries that universities are increasingly judged primarily on how quickly students get their first jobs after graduation.
“Education is so much more: It’s about learning to think critically, to understand different perspectives and to decide how to act in the world.”
The real test
For now, it is the practical work that is high on the agenda: Recruiting students, arranging visas, coordinating teaching plans, and aligning four universities across two continents.
For the CBS academics, the real moment will come when the first cohort of students arrives in Copenhagen in September 2026.
“That’s when the ideas move from paper into the lecture room,” Whitfield says.
“And that’s when you find out whether the conversation truly changes.”
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