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Although women outnumber men in higher education participation in many regions, there is still a gender gap in Sub-Saharan Africa, with far fewer females enrolling than males. This is true even with affirmative action policies in place in many university settings. Not surprisingly, there is a corresponding dearth of female leadership in African universities, as faculty and at all levels of administration. This study used a constructivist design to glean insights from six female attendees at the 2014 Women Leading Education conference in Accra, Ghana, both about their perceived impact at their respective institutions and their perspective on how to improve the higher education landscape for women in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In September 2013, at the convening of the Women Leading Education (WLE) Conference in Apam, Ghana, there was less than a year and a half until 2015, the deadline year for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It is no accident that the third of the eight goals is to "promote gender equality and empower women" (UNSG, 2000), a priority now widely considered integral to sustainable development worldwide, and no secret that the foundational strategy for achieving this particular goal is education. However, far greater emphasis has been historically placed on increasing access to primary education in the developing world without similar attention to what follows, particularly higher education. Nowhere has this trend been more consistent or more consequential than in Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular detriment to women.

The World Bank in particular, as a major funder of African education during the Structural Adjustment period in the 1980s, chose to systematically de-prioritize investment in higher education. Instead, universal primary education (the first of the eight MDGs) was emphasized largely because at the time there was a widespread belief that the Rate of Return on Education (RORE) for primary education was higher than that of either secondary or tertiary education, a hypothesis that has since been widely discredited (Bloom & Rosovsky, 2011; Colclough, Kingdon, & Patrinos, 2009; Moja, 2004; Tiyambe Zeleza & Olukoshi, 2004).

Closer to the turn of the millennium, this viewpoint was reexamined from a funding standpoint and the World Bank shifted some of its attention towards fixing the decaying university systems in Africa, acknowledging in new reports that, "Neglecting tertiary education could...

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