Learning from ‘Good’ Practice: What Could African [Universities] Possibly Learn from the Bologna Process and European Students’ Mobility?

Abstract

In June 1999, European Ministers of Education and representatives of higher education gathered in Bologna, Italy, and agreed to work towards achieving the European Higher Education Area through a package of structural reforms. This move heralded the Bologna Process (BP). Although the BP has been criticized variously across Europe and elsewhere, however, it appears to be the most profound change encountered by European Higher Education in the 21st Century. The Bologna Process has inspired a number of moves towards restructuring of higher education globally, notably in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Arab countries. In this paper, the author assesses developments within Africa’s higher education in order to establish in what ways African Higher Education reform initiatives have responded to various global challenges posed by the emergence of the BP. The paper specifically addresses four key questions: i) Has Africa achieved the African Higher Education Area, AHEA? ii) What transparency tools are available within AHEA to enable the interpretation and conversion of academic work from one African country to academic work in another? iii) What mobility frameworks relative to the terms of the BP, are there for the African students? And finally, how does African Union (AU) governments’ commitment to higher education reforms differ from those of the European Union governments? The author emphasises that learning from good practice is a step in the right direction, and therefore concludes that Africa could still maintain her Africanness while adopting the good practices of other regions such as that offered through the Bologna Process. Doing so, would enable Africa to forge a compatible approach towards the positioning of Africa’s higher education to compete with other education systems at the global arena.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p2092