In a recent online seminar on the African Continental Qualifications Framework (ACQF), co-hosted by the EDE Project and the EQPE Project, participants tackled a deceptively technical question with continent-wide consequences: how do we make qualifications “readable” across borders in ways that expand opportunity, build trust, and strengthen African higher education, without flattening the rich differences between national systems?
The session was introduced by Prof. Sioux McKenna of Rhodes University, who set an honest tone by naming a familiar tension. Qualifications frameworks can invite scepticism, especially when they drift into bureaucratic “box-ticking”, yet they also matter profoundly for student mobility and for building a sense of shared purpose across African higher education systems.
The main presentation was delivered by Dr. Sanele Nene, Director of Standards and Capacity Development at the Council on Higher Education in South Africa. He framed the conversation as both urgent and practical: even if one does not claim “expert” status, the sector cannot avoid the question of how qualifications travel and what happens when they don’t.
At its core, the ACQF is an African Union initiative (supported by European partners) designed to create compatibility between qualification systems across Africa while safeguarding national sovereignty. Its promise is straightforward but far-reaching: improved student mobility, more reliable recognition of qualifications, and stronger cross-border collaboration.
What makes this framework especially relevant for universities and for doctoral education in particular is that it aims to solve a real, everyday problem that many students encounter: moving between systems and finding their qualifications questioned, discounted, or misunderstood. These recognition challenges are not only administrative headaches; they become barriers that reproduce inequality across regions and institutions. The seminar also highlighted another less visible cost: where trust is low between systems, research collaboration suffers, because institutions hesitate to accept each other’s standards, processes, and outcomes.
The ACQF is not meant to replace national or regional frameworks. It is designed to work alongside National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) and Regional Qualifications Frameworks (RQFs) in a non-hierarchical relationship, more like a shared language than a chain of command.
One of the most consequential ideas in the discussion was the ACQF approach to “referencing.” In plain terms, referencing is the method used to compare qualification levels across countries. The emphasis here matters: the seminar was clear that referencing is not a ranking of quality, nor a backdoor attempt to declare some systems “better” than others. It is intended to demonstrate equivalence to enable movement, recognition, and collaboration, best understood as a confidence-building exercise that can foster mutual trust over time. This is also why the framework was described as a “translation hierarchy,” not a “power hierarchy”: it is supposed to translate across systems rather than dominate them.
For postgraduate education, the implications are especially provocative. The seminar suggested that doctoral education can be reimagined as a continental strategic resource, something that does not belong only to individual institutions or countries, but is part of a shared African academic project. If that framing is taken seriously, it opens new possibilities: more cross-border academic movement, growth in joint supervision arrangements, stronger regional research networks, and clearer visibility and portability of postgraduate qualifications. At the same time, the seminar underscored that increased mobility and recognition come with sharper scrutiny. Supervision, examination practices, research output expectations, and quality assurance processes are likely to face more consistent comparison and interrogation across borders.
As the EDE and EQPE communities continue to engage these issues, the ACQF raises a set of questions that deserve sustained debate across universities, doctoral schools, and policy arenas. What would it take for “recognition” to become not just an administrative decision, but a genuine act of continental solidarity? How do we protect contextual specificity while still enabling portability? And what new forms of partnership, joint supervision models, shared doctoral training, cross-border examination pools, regional research clusters—might become possible if trust were treated as a collective investment rather than an institutional gamble?
By Dr Lillian Omondi – Maseno University, Kenya
Interested to learn more? View the recording:
