Ghanaian entrepreneur Fred Swaniker has many rethinking higher education in Africa. He has opened what some are calling the “university of the future.”

He founded the African Leadership University (ALU), opening first in Mauritius in 2015, and then two years later another undergraduate campus opened in Kigali, Rwanda. “The three- to four-year-long programs ask students to pursue real-world missions (rather than academic majors), and bring tuition down to as low as $4,000 per year, per student, by embracing online and peer-to-peer learning. They also offer an innovative financing model: free tuition in exchange for 10% of post graduation earnings for 5 to 10 years, and the clock starts at the same time for everyone, regardless of when they find employment,” Fast Company reported.

Currently, there are 1,200 students enrolled in ALU.

In 2018 he opened the first low-cost ALX leadership accelerator in a Nairobi coworking space. ALX offers a six-month-long course of study to 200 students. Swaniker is looking to open future ALX locations in Cape Towns, and is in negotiating with the government of Botswana about a new ALU campus.

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Swaniker says his educational facilities will help stop Africa’s brain drawing. “Eighty percent of our academy graduates were leaving Africa to go to college. As an African trying to develop African leaders, that didn’t sit well with me. I realized that we need to have our own world-class universities, but we don’t have the time, money, and resources of the rest of the world. So we have to design a new educational model for [Africa’s] large, untapped talent pool. If we don’t, this could be a global crisis. But if we get it right, this could be a massive opportunity for the world,” he told Fast Company.

And says Swaniker offers even more leadership skills. “[When our first-year ALU students] began their internships, they started receiving full-time job offers—after just eight months in school. We thought, If we have a program that is getting people job-ready, why don’t we offer [that curriculum] as a stand-alone? We’re offering it first in Kenya, to people who already have college degrees but lack employable skills. Over time we’ll start taking kids straight out of high school and expand to a multiyear program so that you [could] join ALX instead of going to college. Because we use coworking spaces rather than build our own campuses, we can open quickly and bring down the cost of education,” he explained.