Challenges facing higher education in the Southern African Development Community

Abstract

In many African countries, general and higher education had witnessed a long period of relative neglect and stagnation, which resulted in a gross decline in the quality of the education. As a consequence, the South African Development Community (SADC),1 higher education community and other stakeholders sought new mechanisms to improve the quality of education in the region, to counter the perceived decline and the variances in the quality of the higher education sectors. An analysis of data mapping out the higher education landscape of the SADC region identifies that the availability of qualified teachers at all levels of the system is one of the key factors enabling and challenging the potential of the higher educational sector, both in terms of development of the sector itself and the role that higher education can play in the regional development. The higher education practitioners in the SADC region realise that assuring quality education is the key to achieve policy goals such as student and staff mobility and the portability of qualifications, to regulate private provision, to assure qualification equivalence frameworks and to increase co-operative teaching and learning. Up to date SADC has done the groundwork in the establishment of the current practices to propose a strategy to assure the quality for the provision in the region, but much needs still to be done to address the different challenges facing the sector, to ensure sufficient numbers of qualified pedagogical staff, to improve quality assurance practices, to address the capacity needs and to develop the national systems in such a way that it could be comparable.