Impact Higher Education in Kenya and Ethiopia

IMPACT HE aims to enable diverse African universities as strong local development agents, enhancing their capacity to contribute to sustainable development, drive development cooperation agendas, shape policy, and partner with EU universities in pursuit of common development goals. It responds to the question of how to ensure mutually beneficial partnerships and builds on the fact that many EU development agencies now promote the concept of ‘decolonizing’ HE in their programmes.  

The IMPACT-HE project intends to reinforce the capacity of the partner universities to coordinate and monitor the different higher education development cooperation projects and funding they receive, in the interest of enhancing impacts at the level of academic study programmes and research and enable them as stronger local development agents. The capacity of staff of the services and offices that manage international cooperation, quality assurance and outreach are directly targeted.

The IMPACT-HE project will also enable African universities to participate in the EU funding programmes, such as Erasmus+, more effectively, and engage ministries to ensure wider impact assessment of development cooperation programmes in their countries. 

The specific objectives are:

• SO1: To enhance the capacities of African universities in Kenya and Ethiopia - two pilot countries - to manage and coordinate international development cooperation funds and projects, ensuring deeper institutional and societal impacts.
• SO2: To reinforce internal project monitoring mechanisms and structures in African universities, linked to their own quality culture, data collection capacity, and ability to strategically assess impact.
• SO3: To provide a platform and a framework to map and assess different development cooperation funds and projects in the HE sector, to better align them, trace cumulative impacts, and inspire synergies at the national and regional levels in Africa
• SO4: To engage African policy makers, HEI, and EU agencies in joint policy development and impact assessment, in pursuit of impactful and mutually beneficial development cooperation.

The types of services provided are:

• Mapping of international project offices (staffing, strategy, projects, systems)
• Capacity building
• Development of a collaboration platform
• Engaging stakeholders
• Running events (workshops, networking) and communication

The project is Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.