Quality Audit in Higher Education in Ethiopia: Lesson Learned From Piloting Work in a Public University.

Abstract

Ethiopia is currently engaged in higher education reform. The reforms introduce new elements as clearly stated in the Higher Education Proclamation, 2003. Some of the reforms introduced are: university students are to share the costs of higher education; the expansion of private higher education; two key agencies have been set up to guide and oversee the sector: Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency (HERQA) and Higher Education Strategic Center (HESC) and institutions are highly encouraged to income generation rather than depending on public funding and would be moving from extreme centralization towards institutional autonomy. The number of both public and private higher education institutions has also dramatically increased in the last five years. The effort put so far by the government in expanding higher education in the country is encouraging, however, as the sector expands and more private HEIs become established there is a necessity to set standards and to assure the quality of the provision of education on offer to students in Ethiopia. To accomplish the provision of quality assurance, the Government of Ethiopia established Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency (HERQA) in 2003. HERQA is mandated to promote public confidence that the quality of provision and standards of awards in higher education are being safeguarded and enhanced. To this end, the agency is required to carry out external audits of the academic performance of institutions. One of the mandates of the agency is to develop methods and procedures for undertaking audits of higher education institutions. HERQA intends this to be a collaborative process. An attempt is made to look into standard procedures and experiences employed in other countries in the area of internal and external quality audit and piloting works have been done in Debub university, Ethiopia, to learn how such auditing methods and procedures could be developed specific to Ethiopian higher education institutions. Important lessons and clear in-sight on process of audit, data collection methods, and the content of the audit report were learned from such piloting work.