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Improving equity and access to Higher Education in Africa
The purpose of the program is to identify strategies for increasing equity and access to higher education in Africa. This is no small task and it is an extremely important one. The Collaborative seeks to accomplish this task by serving as a think tank and source of information for policy makers, practitioners and the interested public. AHEC is a project of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), a division of the Institute of International Education (IIE). The IIE MENA regional office has partnered with CIES to provide logistical support. The AHEC program is sponsored by the Ford Foundation office in Egypt.
The need to increase equity and access to higher education is critically important to Africa. Increased access to quality higher education increases the capacity of the African continent to create a future prosperity, improve public health, advance sustainability, and much more. Yet higher education systems everywhere are over-extended and under-resourced and are trying to respond to massive demand world wide.
The result is a pressing need for high quality research on higher education equity and access on the African continent and beyond; for identifying viable and practical policy solutions that address the sources of inequality; for designing financial mechanisms and funding options to improve access; and for improving delivery systems of education in a effort to alleviate the most serious inequities in the quality of higher education.
Because a group of scholars collaborating across countries and academic disciplines has the potential to find better solutions than any one individual scholar. There is tremendous power in comparing ideas, in sharing information and in testing solutions by deliberating what works, where and how.
The AHEC process will allow participants to develop new ways of thinking and working collaboratively on issues central to the development of equitable and accessible higher education opportunities across the African continent. Participants will be able to create a network of information and expertise that will advance solutions and provide invaluable guidance to policy makers, practitioners and the public at large.
The initial meeting of the Collaborative was held in Cairo, from February 9 to 12, 2008. The purpose of this first meeting was to provide participants with the opportunity to get to know other scholar participants from Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, to meet the three resource persons for the AHEC, Dr. Patti Peterson, Dr. Hoda Elsadda and Dr. Pundy Pillay, and to set goals for the work of the collaborative.
Each participant brought his/her own academic discipline, background, experience and aspirations. Higher education itself is an important research field that has much to offer. At the same time, the opportunity to engage with participating scholars face to face also began the important process of information sharing and of adding new perspectives to individual work of the participating scholars.
A second meeting is planned for October 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The final meeting of the AHEC program will take place in Nairobi, Kenya, in the spring of 2009.
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