Global MBA (Durham); Hons. DipJourn (Nairobi); DipJourn (Union College); Accredited Assessor in Higher Education (Rhodes).

Francis heads Rhodes University's Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership. He joined the SPI - Africa's only university-level institute which educates and trains graduates and editors in media leadership and management - in 2004.

Mdlongwa distinguished himself as an international desk editor, bureau chief and senior roving international correspondent of Reuters, the world's leading news and information agency, which employed him in several world capitals, including London, Nairobi and Harare, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Mdlongwa has headed several African media. He has been Group Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers, publishers of Zimbabwe's Daily News, which was banned by the government in 2003; he was Editor-in-Chief of the Financial Gazette, an authoritative financial newspaper based in Harare, for nearly a decade; and he was head of news and current affairs at Channel Africa, the external news service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).

He is a media consultant who has run journalism and media management training programmes in the former Eastern Bloc nations of Serbia and Montenegro, and in African countries such as Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Zimbabwe, working on behalf of the International Research & Exchanges Board based in Washington DC, and the Reuters Foundation.