Representatives of higher education institutions and regulators in Mauritius and Seychelles met in Port Louis on 27 and 28 October to examine how they assess quality. The workshop brought together participants from 23 institutions and regulatory bodies, according to UNESCO.
Discussions focused on adapting quality checks to island education systems and on how digital tools could support the work. Mauritius’s Quality Assurance Authority worked with UNESCO on the event, part of a wider series for higher education institutions in southern Africa.
Who decides whether a programme is working?
The University of Seychelles says its director responsible for quality assurance took part alongside the Seychelles Qualifications Authority. That pairing illustrates a distinction at the heart of the discussions. Universities see what happens in classes and examinations. A regulator has to decide whether the evidence an institution presents is convincing to someone outside it.
In Mauritius, the Quality Assurance Authority describes external audits as beginning with an institution examining its own work. External review brings that self-assessment into contact with international expertise and benchmarks. For students, the distinction matters. A prospectus can describe what a degree promises. Evidence from assignments, marking and student feedback can show whether the programme actually gives students the opportunity to achieve those aims.
Take a course that promises students practical research experience. Counting the lectures delivered would say little about whether students can design a study. A reviewer could instead examine the tasks students completed, how supervisors assessed them and what changed when a cohort struggled. The same question could be asked of an in-person course and one taught partly online, even if the evidence looks different.
Where the islands fit in the regional work
The Port Louis meeting followed earlier workshops in Zimbabwe and Zambia and a joint edition involving Eswatini and Lesotho. Bringing two island systems into that sequence gave participants room to discuss a problem with regional implications: how to make qualifications understandable across borders while allowing universities to demonstrate quality in ways suited to their students and resources.
Digital systems offer one practical example. A university may be able to collect feedback more often through an online form. That alone says little about whose views it captured, whether lecturers saw the results or whether students subsequently experienced a change. Those are questions a quality team can ask regardless of the size of the institution.
The workshop produced an opportunity for institutions and regulators to compare practice. Its significance for students will lie in the decisions taken back on campus, from changing an assessment that measures the wrong skill to showing students how their own feedback shaped the next course.
