This book is the result of a two-year collaboration between African scholars — the African Higher Education Collaborative (AHEC). The project received generous support from the Ford Foundation office in Egypt and brought together twenty scholars from Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Their perspective on the challenging triad of access, quality and cost give voice to the specific contexts and experiences of diverse higher education institutions on the African Continent.

The chapters focus on financial mechanisms and funding options to improve equity and access to higher education; on educational institutions and the services they must provide to improve learner success; on delivery systems, including distance learning, that are responsive to the needs of diverse groups of learners; and on various kinds of marginalization that exacerbate inequity and exclusion, including gender and populations with disabilities.

These four sub-topics also reflect the design of the collaborative itself, which brought a diverse group of scholars together around broadly defined topics of mutual interest. In addition to its topical focus, the collaborative also gave expression to the need for more trans-African collaborations that can bring the unique and varied characteristics of the African context into focus.

The book was published by the Institute of International Education and can be found here.