Senior Director: Institutional Planning and Research
Mangosuthu University of Technology
Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Dr Liile Lerato Lekena-Bayaga is a higher education strategist, institutional research leader, and current Board Member of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR). She serves as Senior Director: Institutional Planning and Research at Mangosuthu University of Technology in South Africa, where she leads institutional strategy, planning, performance monitoring, business intelligence, analytics, and evidence-informed executive decision-making.
Her work is strongly anchored in institutional strategy, transformation, and institutional resilience. She led the development of MUT’s 2026–2030 institutional strategy, titled Ignite 2030, and plays a central role in coordinating the university’s turnaround strategy. In this role, she supports the alignment of executive portfolios with the Institutional Strategic Plan and Annual Performance Plan, ensuring that institutional commitments are translated into measurable performance, governance accountability, and sustained implementation discipline.
Dr Lekena-Bayaga also leads work on business continuity planning, including the development of institutional BCP frameworks and supporting divisions to design their own continuity plans. Her practice brings together institutional business intelligence, strategic foresight, performance analytics, risk-informed planning, and governance reporting to strengthen institutional resilience and long-term sustainability.
She has published extensively in higher education, with interests spanning institutional effectiveness, strategic planning, data-informed governance, AI-enabled planning, and the role of institutional research in shaping future-ready universities. Her current work focuses on how universities, particularly in resource-constrained contexts, can use analytics, foresight, and strategy execution systems to anticipate change, improve decision-making, and deliver measurable institutional impact.
Dr Lekena-Bayaga holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Stellenbosch University, an MPhil in Business Management specialising in Corporate Strategy from the Gordon Institute of Business Science, an MEd in Social Justice Education from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Technology from the University of Cape Town.
Doing More with Less: Decision Intelligence for Strategy & Enrollment
Thursday, May 28, 2026
2:30 PM - 3:15 PM East Coast USA Time