Quality Assurance and Accreditation of Private Universities in Uganda: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The quantitative growth in Ugandan higher education subsector has created many challenges including a drop in quality in education delivery. Today, there are 34 universities in Uganda (up from 26 in 2006) with over 185,000 student (up from 137,190), representing an overall growth rate of more than 15% in the last 5 years. Given this rapid expansion of higher education, some form of regulation is necessary to assure quality. Ugandan government established the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) as a regulatory agency to set standards and regulations to ensure that all public and private tertiary education institutions in Uganda will create, sustain and improve the relevance and quality of higher education for all qualified Ugandans and to meet the local, national and global higher education challenges of the 21st century. This paper discusses the role NCHE has played in providing quality assurance and accreditation mechanisms for private universities in Uganda. We also present the challenges faced in private university education provision in order to expose opportunities for new and old players in the university education system.