EAC Partners Meet to Harmonise their Education

By Henry Neondo

DAR-ES-SALAAM---Education Ministers from East African countries began a five day meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania aimed to harmonise education systems and training curricula among partner states.

The meeting, under the auspices of the East African Community (EAC) Sectoral Council of education was necessitated by the release of a report by the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA) calling for harmonization of the differing education systems in the member states of East Africa.

According to the EAC's principal education officer Aloysius Chebet, the regional body had finalised a study on the harmonisation of the education systems, which "takes a high priority in the integration process and, indeed, in the whole education sector."

The report has also been widely discussed by various stakeholders ahead of its tabling at the ministers’ meeting.

“This is long overdue and a welcome development. The harmonised education curricula and training will speed up movement of people, as envisaged under the EAC Common Market Protocol,’’ said Dr Ali Fungo, Ministry of Education, Tanzania.

The education ministers are also expected to discuss the possibility of accelerating the re-establishment of the East African Examination Council/Board and consider a road map for its re-establishment.

Education, sports and culture are among the sectors which were drastically affected following the collapse of the former EAC in 1977.

Since then, the region has experienced varying degrees of education. Although the education sector has grown rapidly in the past 20 years in all the five countries that form the community, many challenges have impeded the provision of quality higher education: insufficient human capacity, inadequate funding, and lack of standards and mechanisms to regulate the quality of e-learning and cross-border education.

Due to the strength of the Kenya shilling, there is a widely held view that Kenyan education, considered long and tedious attracts less students from partner states compared to Uganda.

The Inter-University Council of East Africa, which is pushing for the harmonisation of higher education systems, says the first courses to be levelled are medicine, agriculture, engineering and basic sciences, whose curricula have already been finalised.

Prof Chacha Nyaigotti-Chacha, executive secretary of the IUCEA, says the specific purpose of harmonization of education systems all over the world is to establish synchronized education systems, as a strategy for strengthening the capacity of education institutions to meet many emerging educational needs.

“Through innovative forms of collaboration, education can systematically be improved against common, agreed benchmarks of excellence thereby facilitating the mobility of students and teachers across the countries”, he said.

He adds that the harmonisation process should be able to look beyond undergraduate studies.

"Graduate programmes are not harmonised. You find that in some universities a student may take 10 years to complete PhD studies, while in others they take four years. We need to look at the duration that one should take in postgraduate studies," Nyaigotti-Chacha said.

Further, newly-established medical institutions will have to be approved by regional regulatory bodies. These universities will now have to adhere to a set of standards developed by regulatory and professional bodies from East Africa.

Harmonising university education in the region will also mean standardisation. Teaching staff from one country will be able to work at any university in the region.

The revived East Africa Community aims to correct missed opportunities since the collapse of the regional body in 1977 following divergent political and economic perceptions of the founding three members Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

It was revived in 1999 and subsequently Rwanda and Burundi have joined the body in 2007.

East Africa Community member states of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania established the present day IUCEA in 1980, with the objective of facilitating contact between the universities of East Africa, providing a forum for discussion on a range of academic and other matters relating to higher education, and helping maintain high and comparable academic standards.

Prof Chacha says it is envisaged that when harmonization is fully realized, the partner states will have a common framework to promote equal access to education opportunities, harmonious quality assurance & accreditation system or process as well as credit transfer modalities and frameworks for student and labour mobility within the EAC region, provision of services, and greater articulation of the education systems of the partner states, among other things.

While the education sector varies in each country, it is however dire in some. For example in Burundi only 42 per cent of adult population is literate. This is thanks to decades of civil wars which have had devastating impact on educational opportunities and investments.

Not to be spared was the loss of competent trained and professional workers and recovery is proving not to be easy. The resultant effect is that generations of young people are having limited access to the education.

In addition, there are displaced people, orphans, street children and former child-soldiers whose income does not allow them to pay for their education.

 The government has a vision of achieving a quality primary education for all the children by 2015. This requires construction of an average of 1500 classrooms and an annual recruitment of more than 2000 new teachers. In communal colleges, 460 classrooms should be built every year to host the pupils from the primary schools

In Rwanda, enrolment in primary schools stands at 2,190,270 with boys being 1,076,159 and girls being 1,114,111.

The net enrolment rate stands at 94.2 per cent while the overall completion rate is at an average of 52.5 per cent. The primary school system has 2, 432 schools and 33,158 teachers.

At secondary school level, enrolments stand at 181,765 of which 52.2 per cent are male while 47.8 per cent are females. The gross enrolment rate at this level is 22 per cent and has a total of 16,105 teachers.

At their meeting, the education ministers are also expected to debate the inclusion of the EAC Treaty into the education syllabi and the under-funding of the education sector.