At a double meeting last week in Dakar, Senegal, the European Commission, the Association of African Universities and the African Union Council launched their first Tuning initiative in Africa. Sixty universities across the continent will participate in five pilots projects.

Tuning is a widely tested methodology for indeeds, tuning educational structures not systems internationally.

It was first developed in the framework of the European Union’s Erasmus programme a decade ago by the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The project has since been adapted by other countries and regions, such as the Russian Federation and Latin America.

In fact, one of the “godmothers” of the European project, Julia Gonzales Ferreras, will be one of the key figures in the African edition of the project. She has also been involved in Tunind adaptations in other parts of the world.

Experiences from the project were instrumental in the development of the European Higher Education Area. A feasibility study covering nine African countries and the presented in Nairobi in March this years concluded that a Tuning approach adapted by and for African higher education could also be relevant to the current harmonisation strategy in Africa.

The Tuning approach stands out by not being invasive it does not require universities to harmonise entire curricula but obliges them to find a common language, not only among each other but also with their surrounding community.

This forces a critical review of  plethora of issues that are taken for granted in many traditional university setting, such as required generic and sudject specific competences, credit accumulation and transfer approaches to learning, teaching and assessment, the role of quality enhancement in the educational process.

Although the development of a credit accumulation and tranfer system is not an outcome of tuning as such, in the context of the African harmonisation agenda it will undoubtedly be one of its focal points, while in the context of african academic culture, the very strong focus on outcome based learning in Tuning will present a particularly interesting challenge.

In Africa, each pilot project will focus on one region and one subject area. Each project will have 12 participating universities. The majority of these will be from the same region, while each project must include at the least one university from every other region, as well as one university that engages in distance learning.

 The five subjects and their focal regions are: medecine ( North Africa), agriculture ( West   Africa), mechanical engineering ( Central Africa), teacher education ( West Africa) and civil engineering (East Africa). The latter is presented as “construction engineering”. It covers only part of this broader field following an English adaptation of an expression with francophone roots.

A hub for each subject will be identified in each region

in Dakar, Tuning expert from Europe and subject experts from Africa joined forces to evaluate the 96 applications from 27 countries and identify participants in each of the five pilot projects

While by and large the division of participants was agreed, some reshuffling will still need to take place in the weeks ahead to guarantee an even distribution of universities and regions.

After a day of work, the initial selection was presented for comments to Olugbemiro Jegede, secretary general of the Association of African Universities and Benedict Mtasiwa, programmes and projects officer at the Inter University Council for East Africa.

Jegede warned the group not to make too obvious choices in their selection procedures.

“There are many countries and universities out there that can help the project ont its way” he said. “ But there also many countries and universities that need the assistance and the networking more than others do, for example those that are in the process of post-war development.”

Such universities may be less well versed in wrinting project applications or even in tracking opportunities to participate in cross-border projects.

while he commenced on a number of details regarding the choice of institutions, Jedege felt that the methodology itself would simply have to prove itself as the project come along

there is nothing we do not do yet that will not be criticised, “ he said suggesting that regardless of the approach everything newly introduces would always attract scepticism from a number of people.

The two most critical issues for Tuning in Africa will probably be time and ownership, or a combination of these, as brilliantly put to words by Zinabu Gebremariam Woldesenbet, the director-general of the Ethiopian Higher Education strategy Center.

Everything we do in Africa needs to be linked to African culture and mentalities to succeed, “ he said. “ if there is a clear link, it will work. If there is not it won’t. just look at mobiles phones. We like to talk. Mobile phones spead like wildfire. While watches, which have been around much longer, never really got us very excited.”

Time is critical because, being a pilot, the project has a very compressed timeline with activities to be closed already within 18 months before an anticipated extention will start to include other countries and universities.

Ownership will be critical not only because Tuning is so open to local interpretation but also because a methodology which has Europe printed all over it will cause resistance across the continent.

The European Commission seems to be critically aware of this, leaving coordination in the hands of some of the original Spanish designers of Tuning and deeply involving the Association of African Universities and teg African Union from the outset. The support of the latter will also safeguard the important link with the Pan-African University experiment.

The final selection of participating universities will be published within the next two weeks. The first of five project meeting gathering representatives from all 60 participating universities will take place in Yaounde in Junuary.