STRENGTHENING QUALITY ASSURANCE
Steering Committee members COL President Sir John Daniel; Professor Olu Jegede, Secretary-General of the Association of African Universities and Professor Narciso Matos, Executive Director of the Foundation for Community Development (Mozambique) at the GIQAC meeting in Paris in December.
The World Bank and UNESCO are leading an initiative to build national capacity for quality assurance in higher education worldwide. The Global Initiative for Quality Assurance Capacity (GIQAC) provides funding for regional networks of quality assurance agencies around the globe.
GIQAC has made an impact on QA in higher education in a relatively short time, according to COL President Sir John Daniel, a member of the GIQAC Steering Committee:
“The increase in maturity of the regional QA networks is palpable, particularly those in Africa, the Arab world and the Caribbean that started from a low base. The number of countries with their own national QA agencies is growing steadily and it is clear that those starting up such agencies benefit enormously from the contacts with more seasoned practitioners in the region that the networks facilitate.”
More about GIQAC on the World Bank website: www.tinyurl.com/GIQAC-WorldBank
Sir John Daniel’s blog post from 8 December: www.col.org/blog89
“A partnership between the World Bank and UNESCO is like putting a rhinoceros and an elephant in harness together”.
RADIO SCRIPTWRITING COMPETITION
Ten African broadcasters have been named winners in Farm Radio International’s radio scriptwriting competition on healthy communities. The ten award-winning scripts told stories about initiatives that are contributing to community health such as purifying drinking water, composting and nutrition.
More than 400 people who work in radio in Africa registered for an online scriptwriting course prior to the competition. Held over 10 weeks, the course taught essential skills for writing scripts for radio. Five African facilitators assisted participants, many of whom had never taken online training before. Participants who had poor Internet access received CD-ROMs so they could work offline.
After the online training course, 128 scripts from 23 countries were submitted to the competition. The 10 winners received Olympus LS-10 audio recorders. Their scripts are posted on the Farm Radio website and will be distributed to the Farm Radio’s network of 500 radio broadcasters in Africa.
Organised by Farm Radio International, an Ottawa-based non-governmental organisation that works with African radio broadcasters to combat poverty and food insecurity, the scriptwriting course and competition are sponsored by COL, the Canadian Public Health Association and the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA).
www.farmradio.org
IMPROVING EDUCATION SYSTEMS
COL Vice President Professor Asha Kanwar was one of the speakers in the “Improving Education Systems” theme at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) 2010 in Doha, Qatar in November. More than 1,200 international education leaders from 100 countries took part in WISE 2010.
www.wise-qatar.org