Sbu Dantjie

Sbu Dantjie
Partner and Education Lead, Consulting, EY Africa

Sbu is a strategy, technology and transformation leader with over two decades of experience across higher education, public service and major private-sector industries. He has advised C-suite executives and boards and led large-scale transformation programmes spanning institutional strategy, financial sustainability, digital transformation, operating models, data and AI, and value realisation.

Prior to EY, Sbu held several senior leadership roles, including serving as Accenture’s Higher Education lead in Africa.

Sbu is also a returning PURCON speaker. At PURCON 2024, he presented “A Blueprint for Strategic Transformation and Sustainable Impact in South African Higher Education” and co-presented in the session “Financial Sustainability: The Case for a Sustainable Value Office.”

Keynote address: Friday 16 October 2026

From funding to impact: Reimagining Grants Management in Higher Education
Connecting funding, governance, technology and outcomes across the grant lifecycle.

Universities are under increasing pressure to secure and manage funding effectively, strengthen governance, reduce administrative burden, and demonstrate the impact that funding ultimately creates. Yet grant management is often fragmented across systems, teams and processes, limiting visibility and creating unnecessary administrative effort and risk.

This session will explore how institutions can treat grants management as an end-to-end institutional capability rather than simply an administrative process. We will unpack four principles (designing for users, focusing on outcomes, preparing for complexity and innovating with technology) and explore their application from programme design and application through assessment, award, post-award monitoring and impact reporting.

Using a higher-education research and innovation funding scenario, the session will practically illustrate how integrated workflows, data, analytics, automation and AI can improve efficiency, governance, transparency and decision-making; ultimately helping institutions move from funding to measurable impact.

Delegates will leave with a practical lens for assessing their own grants environment and identifying opportunities to simplify, standardise and digitise the grant lifecycle; ultimately contributing to improving funding outcomes, institutional control and measurable impact.