Quality Assurance of Higher Education Governance and Management: An Exploration of the Minimum Imperative for the Envisioned African Common Higher Education Space

Overview & Synopsis

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.