Post-2015 European support to African HE taking shape

From 2015, the European Union’s new Pan-African Programme will be used to expand and extend the coverage of its Tuning Africa project and a new, linked initiative, to more broadly support quality assurance and accreditation in Africa.

The latter has been conceived to support the development of a harmonised quality assurance and accreditation system in Africa.

It aims to nurture institutional cultures of quality, and support the implementation of the Pan-African Quality Assurance Framework.

This was one of the subjects of discussion at the 6th International Conference on Quality Assurance in Higher Education in Africa, held from 15-19 September in Bujumbura, Burundi.

The EU will also more broadly support the development of capacity among quality assurance and accreditation bodies – a type of support that almost all involved parties agree represents one of the most urgent needs in African academia.

The underlying aim is to maintain the current thrust and momentum in pan-African quality assurance developments.

The activities will partly build on the results of a study exploring a Pan-African Quality Assurance and Accreditation Framework.

The study was jointly commissioned by the African Union and the EU and was carried out by Nigerian Peter Okebukola, who played a prominent role in the Bujumbura conference, and Belgian consultant Bart Fonteyne.

The two researched the possible design and practical implications of such a continental framework. Feedback from the Bujumbura conference will be integrated into the report, the final version of which is expected to be validated at a meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in February 2015.

The Tuning pilot project was launched in 2011 as the African Higher Education Harmonisation and Tuning project.

It has rapidly built itself a reputation in recent years for its very practical way of cooperating across borders to improve the relevance of higher education curricula.

Sixty universities from across the continent participated in the pilot phase, which covered five subject areas. The pilot phase will be closed at a workshop in November that was originally scheduled to take place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, but has been moved because of the Ebola crisis, most likely to Tanzania.

At the workshop, the Tuning universities, regional associations and accreditation agencies will test the design of joint degree programmes in the five subject areas.

During the next phase, to be launched in 2015, the total number of participating universities will be doubled while the number of subject areas will be expanded to at least seven.