Alwin Education Ltd
Chief Academic Officer
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Chief Academic Officer, South Africa
Alwin Education South Africa
Location: South Africa (regional travel required)
Reports to: COO, Alwin Education Global
Type: Full-time, Country Executive
About Alwin Education
Alwin Education’s mission is to build a digitally native network of locally accredited higher-education institutions in markets where demand for tertiary education materially exceeds public-sector supply, expanding access, strengthening quality, and aligning every programme to labour-market demand, starting in South Africa.
The role
As Chief Academic Officer, you will own academic strategy, quality, and standards across all of Alwin's South African institutions. You will be the senior-most academic voice in the group, the person regulators, institutional Senates, and faculty leadership turn to, and the architect of how the LearnerOS "Elevate" pillar translates into real curriculum, teaching, and learning outcomes on the ground at each campus.
This is a build role. You'll be establishing group-wide academic governance and standards for the first time across a growing portfolio of institutions, each with its own PHEI registration, Senate, and accreditation history. You will need to be equally comfortable setting long-term academic strategy and getting into the detail of a single institution's programme approval. Our central team’s strength is in digitising and building curriculum for multimode delivery (contact, hybrid, and fully online/distance learning) and so you will be working closely with Alwin’s Product and Learning team on setting the programme roadmap and sourcing faculty and subject matter experts for the development of new accredited programmes through our institutions.
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Key responsibilities
Academic strategy & standards
- Define and maintain a group-wide academic quality framework for South Africa that each institution can adopt without compromising its own accreditation or autonomy
- Own curriculum strategy, ensuring programmes are aligned to labour-market outcomes and delivered consistently
- Set and monitor academic KPIs (pass rates, progression, NBT/entry benchmarks, graduate outcomes, employability outcomes) across the portfolio
Regulatory & governance
- Serve as principal academic liaison to the Council on Higher Education (CHE) and Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), including for institutions undergoing structural or registration changes
- Chair or advise institutional Academic/Senate committees; ensure programme accreditation, re-accreditation, and qualification submissions are managed proactively across the group
- Work closely with legal counsel (internal & external) and institutional leadership on any regulatory filings affecting academic registration or qualification status
Faculty & institutional leadership
- Build relationships with Deans, Heads of Department, and faculty across acquired institutions; lead academic integration during onboarding of new acquisitions
- Recruit, develop, and retain senior academic leadership at institution level
- Champion academic staff development and a consistent, high standard of teaching quality across all modalities and campuses with very different starting points
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What we're looking for
- Deep, credible experience in South African higher education at a senior academic leadership level (DVC: Academic, CAO, Registrar, or equivalent), with direct exposure to CHE/DHET accreditation processes
- Track record of leading academic quality or curriculum transformation across more than one institution, ideally in a private higher education or multi-campus context
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment where structures are still being built, not just administered
- Strong relationships with, or credibility within, South African regulatory bodies
- Experience with digital/blended learning delivery (LMS platforms, online programme design) is a strong advantage
- Excellent stakeholder management across faculty, regulators, and a commercially-minded executive team
Why join Alwin
You'll shape South African academic strategy for a group built specifically to modernise African higher education at scale with the backing, platform, and pace of a well-funded, founder-led group, and direct influence from day one rather than years into an established bureaucracy.
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