By The Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), has congratulated Ghana and Seychelles, according to a report published yesterday, 6th of July, on the African press Organisation Website, “for having well-developed management information systems for their higher education institutions.”
This praise came in during “a technical workshop on Higher Education Management Information Systems (HEMIS) benchmarking organized by ADEA’s Working Group on Education Management and Policy Support (WGEMPS) and that of Higher Education (WGHE), in collaboration with the Association of African Universities (AAU), held in Accra (Ghana) from 29th to 30th of June 2017,” according to reports.
According to reports, the “workshop attracted 25 participants, among them Prof. Mohammed Salifu, the Executive Secretary of the Ghana National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE), who was the Chairperson during the opening session.”
The report highlighted other key delegates to include “Dr. Yohannes Woldetensae, Senior Education Expert, African Union Commission (AUC); Ms. Rachel Ogbe, Principal Programme Officer for Education, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); Mr. David Blaise Ossene, Education and Culture Expert, Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS); Ms. Nodumo Dhlamini, Director of ICT Services & Knowledge Management, AAU; several senior HEMIS experts from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal; senior Educational Management Information Systems (EMIS) experts from the University of Moundou in Chad and from five universities from Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; University of Cape Coast; University of Ghana; University of Mines and Technology and University for Professional Studies of Accra).”
The mandate before the workshop was to “build a strong HEMIS to provide quality information that supports informed decision making in leadership, governance and management of higher education institutions, and for facilitating sound sector planning, monitoring and evaluation, financing and quality assurance.” This is believed to be carried out “by identifying best practices, and needs in terms of capacity building and strategy development with specific areas that the universities would provide.”
Speaking on behalf of Ms. Oley Dibba-Wadda, the ADEA Executive Secretary, Mr. Makha Ndao, WGEMPS Coordinator, “stressed the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive and reliable statistics for the higher education sub sector,” highlighting the success of Ghana and Seychelles in this end. He said, “Higher Education is one of education sub sectors in Africa where it is very difficult to get comprehensive and reliable statistics. Only 2 out of 23 countries (i.e. Ghana and Seychelles) in Sub-Saharan Africa completed the Higher and Tertiary Education questionnaire to UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2015.”
Correspondent: Olayiwola A. Ridwan