The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread closure of physical learning at universities in Kenya and South Africa. Many universities turned to e-learning to provide educational continuity, but they now face the challenge of how to reopen safely and resume in-class learning. This is difficult to achieve without methods for measuring the impact of university policies on student physical interactions. This paper is an attempt to explain briefly what we can learn from education emergency responses from emerging country perspectives. We shall analyze the emergency education responses to the COVID-19 pandemic of Universities in Kenya and South Africa since March 2020. We will attempt to interrogate whether remote learning in the two countries is perceived as effective and try to explain the successes or otherwise of utilizing remote learning in institutions of higher learning. We will focus on how e-learning has brought to the fore, new challenges in delivery systems and the challenges, if any, in curriculum adjustments and how the academic faculty were able to weather through these unsurmountable challenges with minimum support from the university administration. The paper outlines the key challenges and successes faced in embracing on-line learning by both the students and the academic members of staff during this era of the COVID-19 pandemic.