The IUCEA Stakeholder Forum is taking significant steps to advance higher education data management across East Africa. The forum’s objectives include the following:
- Developing harmonized guidelines for data collection
- Proposing a roadmap for implementing a regional Higher Education Information Management System (HEIMS)
- Promoting shared ownership in the HEIMS initiative
- Establishing a regional Steering Committee and data working group.
OBREAL has a long-standing partnership with IUCEA. It is driven by the belief that higher education is a catalyst for regional integration and development. Effective data collection, management, and analysis are crucial for informed decision-making, planning, policy development, and quality assurance in education.
The HAQAA3 Data Work Area
Currently, OBREAL leads phase three of the Harmonization of Accreditation and Quality Assurance of African Higher Education (HAQAA3), in collaboration with DAAD, AAU, and ENQA where IUCEA is one of our Key Strategic partners and a member of the Steering Committee. The project has been awarded by the European Commission under the Africa-EU Joint partnership and runs for five years.
One of the major focus areas of the HAQAA initiative is enhancing the capacity of African higher education for data collection for policy. HAQAA3’s Data work area implements the roadmap developed under HAQAA2 and explores, with stakeholders, the most appropriate regional approaches that respect legal, political, and linguistic constituencies. The goal is to consolidate regional building blocks, where they make sense, for ultimately stronger and more coherent African HE data.
