Our recent London conference held in partnership with University of South Wales was focused on expanding access to tertiary education for 5 million African students and on how innovative technological approaches can increase access to higher education. The conference was a huge success as senior leaders from UK, European and Asian universities, educators and governmental ministers from Africa and experts in higher education administration were among the attendees.
As our Academic Director, Dr. Suzan Koyzis, said, “We are working on defining the instructional approaches that will allow us and our colleagues at universities worldwide to educate the next 5 million students in Africa. We welcome collaboration and exchange on these topics and consider them to be of critical importance in developing the human potential of the next generation.”
Through UNICAF, students in Sub-Saharan Africa can access and afford internationally recognized Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes focused on employability. Students are eligible for scholarships up to 80% of the cost of tuition, depending on the student’s financial need. UNICAF has built a full stack technology platform for delivery of these degree programmes, focused on maintaining consistent, high quality in an efficient online and mobile format. UNICAF, which has enrolled thousands of students from Sub-Saharan Africa, is one of the largest online university degree providers in the region.
Lord Williams of Oystermouth, the chancellor of the University of South Wales the keynote speaker of the event also commented that he believes that expanding access to education in Africa is an important initiative, consistent with the mission of our university and conducive to the global development of higher education.
University of South Wales, in addition to three other universities, has pledged to make its degree programmes available to African students with significant scholarship support via our Scholarship Schemes. By the words of our director, Dr Nikos Nicolaou, “Sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of about 800M people, over 50% below the age of 19, is the most underserved region in the world for higher education. Less than 10% of potential students have access to a university education and millions of students are turned away annually due to capacity constraints. UNICAF was founded to bridge the gap and to make affordable international-caliber university education available and affordable across Sub-Saharan Africa”.
Below you can find PodCasts from the conference.
