President Yoweri Museveni has urged East African Community -EAC member states to work towards a common education area to enable easier recognition of qualifications and facilitate the mobility of academic and skilled labour.
Museveni said the initiative, starting with a common higher education area-CHEA, could unlock the full potential of all member states by allowing individuals trained in one country to continue studies or gain employment in another without obstacles.
Museveni shared a historical example of Ugandans who studied in countries like India during the pre-colonial period but faced challenges when their qualifications were not recognized by the protectorate government, forcing them to undergo “unnecessary tests” if they were to work in Uganda. He said harmonized education standards and qualification assurance within the EAC could prevent such issues in the future.
Museveni made the remarks while opening the first Regional Ministerial Conference on the EAC Common Higher Education Area in Kampala.
The president took the attending delegates to a history and pan Africanism lesson, outlining the region’s past cooperation and stressing why East Africa must integrate. He pointed to the economic, political, and social benefits that a united community would bring, including stronger trade, shared infrastructure, and greater global influence.
On the education front, the president said the framework, if adopted in the spirit of integration, could remove unnecessary barriers. He cited an example where Uganda schools and institution where charging students from countries like South Sudan higher fees under the pretext of being international students. Museveni called the practice unfair and said he intervened to ensure all East African students paid the same rates.
In 2017, the EAC established the Common Higher Education Area through a treaty aimed at harmonizing curricula, promoting academic and skill mobility, and strengthening regional integration through education.
The framework provided for compatible national qualification frameworks, shared quality assurance standards and practices, common credit systems, standardized recognition of qualifications, a unified academic calendar with aligned years and semesters, and uniform fees for all East African students.
The Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA) was also created and tasked with driving this agenda, and several policies have since been adopted to guide implementation and a roadmap was designed in 2022.
However, Prof. Gaspard Banyankimbona, IUCEA Executive Secretary, noted that while the vision is well laid out, its implementation across member states remains a tug of war. Many of the policies are still unimplemented at individual state level. He said progress requires both political will and institutional accountability.
Education Minister Janet Museveni said that the individual governments will appreciate relevance of a Common Higher Education Area when the higher education sub-sector becomes a source of pragmatic policy solutions to the pressing problems in society aspiring for socio-economic transformation.
“This implies that our aspiration for an integrated Higher Education Area is purposeful because it does not seek to fulfill the self-interests of Higher Education per se, but the greater good of the more than 300 million people in the East African Community, “she said.
Mrs Museveni added that to gain from the benefits, there is a need to eliminate all barriers to the realization of a truly integrated and common Higher Education Area in which the sub-sector is perceived by both the private sector and the State, as a valuable partner to socio-economic transformation and not merely another area of expenditure.
Before 1970, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania shared a somewhat unified higher education system with a single regional university which had constituent colleges in Nairobi, Makerere, and Dar es Salaam. There were other regional education institutions such as the East African Examinations Council and the East African Literature Bureau also supported integration of the education.
However, the collapse of the original EAC in 1977 led to the disintegration of this framework. The University of East Africa was split into three independent institutions: the University of Nairobi, Makerere University, and the University of Dar es Salaam. Other regional bodies also ceased to exist.
With the expansion of the EAC to include Burundi, DRC, Rwanda, Somalia, and South Sudan, member states are seeking to revive efforts toward a common higher education area.