Abstract
University-industry partnerships are widely promoted as instruments for aligning higher education with labour markets, innovation systems and economic transformation. Yet employability and productivity do not by themselves resolve what such partnerships should ultimately serve. This article develops a flourishing-oriented governance framework for university-industry partnerships in African higher education, using Rwanda as a policy anchor and selected African evidence for comparison. The study combines a critical integrative review, structured documentary analysis, comparative interpretation and explicit normative reasoning informed by human capital theory, the capability approach, African relational ethics, stakeholder theory, meaningful-work scholarship and public-good conceptions of higher education. A bounded structured discovery process yielded 24 contemporary scholarly records; a supplementary currentness check added one directly relevant peer-reviewed study, while 17 foundational theoretical, methodological, policy and statistical sources were selected purposively. The synthesis shows that collaboration can strengthen curricular relevance, workplace learning, innovation, knowledge exchange and graduate transitions, but can also create governance risks involving curricular capture, asymmetric power, inequitable access, weak protection of academic purposes, short-term skill narrowing and inadequate attention to work quality. The proposed Flourishing-Oriented University-Industry Partnership (FUIP) Framework treats employability as a constituent good within nine mutually conditioning dimensions: capability and agency, academic integrity, dignified and meaningful work, reciprocity, epistemic justice, equity, adaptability, public value and accountable governance. It translates these principles into diagnostic questions and safeguards for partnership approval, curriculum co-design, workplace learning, research agreements and quality assurance.