Abstract
In 2018, as part of the African higher education harmonisation drive, the African Union Commission (AUC) issued the African Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ASG-QA). Within the ASG-QA, the AUC commits to promoting good governance and management in higher education institutions and provides governance and management as the second standard. However, there is a dearth of knowledge about the governance and management architecture for higher education institutions in the African higher education landscape that is either implicit or explicit in the ASG-QA. Against the above backdrop—using the ASG-QA as a source of data and content analysis as a data analysis method—the paper examines the governance and management imperative for higher education institutions in the African higher education landscape from the perspective of the AUC. Six themes relating to Africa’s higher education governance and management landscape emerged from the data: the role of the state (or government) in higher education, the internal governance framework, focus on quality and quality enhancement, observance of values of higher education, adherence to the principles of good governance, and capable leadership. The findings suggest that the governance and management architecture under the ASG-QA leans more towards providing common standards for quality assessment of governance and management than creating an identical national higher education governance and management ecosystem across Africa.
Highlights
Higher education in Africa has undergone an ideological shift—from being viewed as a luxury prior to 2000 to the post-2000 recognition of the sector as an engine of national development and an imperative for global competitiveness (African Union Commission [AUC], 2016, 2018; Doh, 2012)
The ASG-quality assurance (QA), in which governance and management comprise the second standard for higher education institutions in Africa, was used as a stand-alone document rather than to complement other methods, because it is a rich source in the sense that it stipulates the standards that are applicable in the African higher education landscape and delves into the background of the development of the standards and guidelines
Skimming, reading, and interpreting the ASG-QA document led to six themes: (1) the role of the state in higher education; (2) the internal governance framework; (3) focus on quality and quality enhancement; (4) observance of values of higher education; (5) adherence to the principles of good governance; and (6) capable leadership
Summary
Higher education in Africa has undergone an ideological shift—from being viewed as a luxury prior to 2000 to the post-2000 recognition of the sector as an engine of national development and an imperative for global competitiveness (African Union Commission [AUC], 2016, 2018; Doh, 2012). The (mis)conception of higher education as a private good—or yielding low returns—influenced many African governments and the major multilateral financiers, notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to assign a lower priority to higher education (Bloom et al, 2014, 2007) and a higher priority to primary education, which was considered a public good. This stance partly explains why higher education was overlooked in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—the 2000 to 2015 global development agenda (Doh, 2012; Teferra, 2020). The little enthusiasm the stakeholders had for higher education resulted in gross underfunding of the sector (World Bank, 2000; Oanda & Sall, 2016; Teferra, 2016) amid escalating demand and triggered an erosion of the quality of higher education
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