Quality Assurance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This article 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 constraints. Only about a third of them have established structured national quality assurance mechanisms, 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 systems in Africa are cost and human capacity requirements.