Abstract
This article traces the process of diffusion and transfer of the European Bologna Process reforms in Africa’s national, sub-regional and regional contexts and examines factors that drive these processes. Considering that African countries are not official signatories but are aligning their systems of education to the BP, and in the absence of a coordinated effort and the use of digital technology to produce and present data that documents and maps out progress, tracing the diffusion process in this context is challenging, which is the reason for limited research in this area. Based on a review of existing literature, this article argues that in Africa, the dissemination and transfer of BP-related reforms started as individual projects by national governments as early as 2000 before metamorphosing into sub-regional and regional initiatives. The article identifies economic, political and discursive factors as well as the selective and silent processes that shaped Bologna transfer at these different levels in Africa.
Highlights
It is probably evident based on literature, that the Bologna Process (BP) reforms signed in 1999 (Bologna Declaration, 1999) by 29 European countries to harmonize European educational systems, enhance comparable and compatible systems of higher education (HE), promote mobilityEuropean Educational Research Journal 20(1)of students and staff, and the competitiveness and attractiveness of European systems of education vis-à-vis the rest of the world, has had a spillover effect beyond Europe’s continental boundaries
In some cases where Bologna/LMD was explicitly acknowledged as a European innovation, we identified cases of direct copy and paste, which we illustrate with an excerpt from Burundi: First, there is the task of doing literature research
There is no gainsaying that the European BP reforms have impacted education policies in Africa in a significant manner
Summary
It is probably evident based on literature, that the Bologna Process (BP) reforms signed in 1999 (Bologna Declaration, 1999) by 29 European countries to harmonize European educational systems, enhance comparable and compatible systems of higher education (HE), promote mobility. The harmonization of the AU, on a broader level, has the potential to create the African HE and research space (AHERS) (African Union, 2007), similar to the EHEA (Eta, 2018a) and facilitate a systematic approach to counteract the challenges of dealing with individual institutions and countries (Zgaga, 2006) This implies that from 2007, at least every country or sub-region in Africa was already in the early phase or advanced stage of implementing Bologna-related reforms. This would not be a farfetched argument considering that African universities have been historically dependent
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