This proposal focuses on migration and mobility as one of the key priorities addressed by the EU’s Comprehensive Strategy with Africa. By addressing capacity building in higher journalism education, the project will promote the quality of information and public discourse about migration and mobility in countries of origin and transit of migration towards Europe. Thus, not only HEIs and the media industry, but also societies at large will be impacted. The project is entitled Communicating Migration and Mobility – E-Learning Programs and Newsroom Applications for Sub-Saharan Africa. CoMMPASS will conceptualize a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) curriculum on media and migration for Sub-Saharan Africa HEIs. Thus, the project will support the highly needed digital transformation of higher education in Sub-SaharanAfrica (SSA). Six HEIs from three LDCs (Burkina Faso, Malawi, Uganda) will participate in the project, alongside 8 HEIs from further African countries as associated partners. The African Media Initiative will serve as an industry partner; the Media Challenge Initiative will ensure the students’ perspective throughout the project. UNESCO is among non-HEI partners. The CoMMPASS project will train 100 researchers and teachers at partner and associated partner HEIs, 380 students participating in pilot teaching of the MOOCs, and 250 practicing journalists. CoMMPASS will furthermore support sustainable regional networks by stipulating the establishment of an Alliance of African Journalism Educators (AAJE) and a Forum for African Journalism Students (FAJS). Major outputs will be the 14-module sets of MOOCs in four key languages for SSA (English, French, Portuguese, Swahili), the pilot teaching and a comprehensive multimedia stakeholder communication strategy aimed at key decision makers for journalism education in SSA.

The overall objective of Joint AQ Africa is to contribute to the harmonization of higher education in Africa by setting up comparable quality assurance systems, defined by the cooperation of national authorities and HEI. The project will engage three pilot countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire), in the development of a model for university institutional and programme level evaluation, based on a joint and complementary approach (national/regional/African continental) in order to inspire joint accreditation in French-speaking Africa, in particular. The methodology involves several stakeholders in this process and ultimately addresses the different gaps that exist in the various countries targeted, in terms of consolidating their QA and accreditation systems:a)Ministries and QA agencies and their capacities to agree on a common model for joint assessment;b)Universities and their abilities to assess their performance against these standards and to build their own internal QA processes;c)The main networks and associations for higher education and quality assurance in Africa, and their capacities to work collectively in the region and internationally, and to promote and apply similar approaches to other African countries and regions.The main outputs will be the development of a joint evaluation model, guidelines for its execution and six pilot evaluations. African partner universities will build capacity for self-assessment, through training for quality assurance staff. Training is also offered to the staff of ministries, and spaces are created whereby ministries and universities co-create approaches and build trust towards their respective QA systems. Through CAMES and important associated partners, awareness will be raised at the political level on the importance of the consolidation of a regional accreditation approach, which can serve systems which do not yet have QA agencies and can put forward mutual recognition of accreditation decisions.