Higher Education Quality Assurance in Sub-Saharan Africa: Status, Challenges, Opportunities, and Promising Practices

This report assesses the status and practice of higher education quality assurance in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on degree-granting tertiary institutions. A main finding is that structured national-level quality assurance processes in African higher education are a very recent phenomenon and that most countries face major capacity constrains. Only about a third of them have established structured national quality assurance mechanism, often only as recently as during the last ten years. Activities differ in their scope and rigor, ranging from simple licensing of institutions by the minister responsible for higher education, to comprehensive system-wide program accreditation and ranking of institutions. Within institutions of higher learning, self assessment and academic audits are gradually being adopted to supplement traditional quality assurance methods. However, knowledge about and experience with self-assessments are limited. The main challenges to quality assurance system in Africa are cost and human capacity requirements. For countries with large tertiary systems, the report recommends institutional, rather than program accreditation as a cost-effective option. However, where tertiary systems are small and underdeveloped, a less formal self-assessment for each institution may be necessary until the capacity could be strengthened to support a more formal nation quality assurance agency in the long run.