Avoid “jobs without workers and workers without jobs’

African Universities and other higher educational institutions, have been asked to review their management systems to meet the human resource development agenda for the continent.

Ms JURU Marie Eglantine, Senior Quality Assurance and Standards Officer of the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), who made call said the review would help put in place the needed dynamics to avoid the syndrome of “jobs without workers and workers without jobs confronting the continent.

Ms JURU was delivering a message on behalf of Prof Mayung Nkunya, Executive Secretary of the Council at the on-going 18th Conference of Rectors, Vice Chancellors and Presidents of African Universities, (COREViP), which is deliberating on improving higher education in Africa.

The Conference is an Assembly of the Chief Executive Officers of member-institutions or their representatives, which meets every two years, to examine common concerns and priorities for the development of higher education in member-institutions.

The Association of African Universities (AAU), in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of Rwanda, and the University of Rwanda (UR), is organizing the Conference, on the theme: ‘Internationalisation of Higher Education in Africa’.

Ms JURU said Africa and the world at large were witnessing prominent dynamics in higher education and the overall human resources development agenda.

‘It is therefore imperative that the higher education fraternity addresses these dynamics by reviewing the way the higher education system is managed, and its role in the development of human resources and innovations, to avoid the syndrome of “jobs without workers and workers without jobs.’

Ms JURU said Higher Education played a crucial role in the socio-economic and technological development of nations, but in Africa, the institutions faced several major challenges, such as the hindrance of student mobility, because the systems were not harmonized.

Others are the threat of providing quality education, because the expansion of higher education is not in tandem with the required resources in addition to the existence of a mismatch between the knowledge, skills and competences graduates attained from higher educational institutions, and the human resource needs of the job market.

She said the IUCEA, as an institution of the East African Community (EAC) responsible for the strategic development of higher education and research, had decided to address the challenges by putting up a number of intervention strategies, particularly those for guiding the harmonization of higher education systems in the region.

‘Among these interventions is the development of a regional quality assurance system, which is now being used as a harmonization tool for quality assurance systems in all the EAC Partner States. The system is based on instruments that are contained in a four-volume quality assurance handbook now being used by the national councils and commissions for higher education and higher education institutions in all the Partner States.

‘However, by itself, the handbook did not constitute the regional quality assurance system. Therefore, to fill this shortfall, a regional quality assurance policy framework had to be developed called the Principles and Guidelines in Quality Assurance in Higher Education in East Africa meant to guide and harmonize quality assurance processes and practices in higher education.

The regional quality assurance system is a framework for promoting comparability of the quality of higher education, and therefore enhancing student mobility in the Community.