Project Information

Project Information

AHEAD has provided technical advisory services to the "Illuminating Student Voices in Higher Education Project." This project is conducted through a partnership between Makerere's Institute for Social Research (MISR) and the Ford Foundation.

Through a combination of workshops, the project serves to highlight student concerns and experiences at the tertiary level in East Africa. The results of the research will be published in the Journal of African Higher Education and the Kenyan creative arts journal, Kwani by late 2006.

Specifically, the project objectives are:

1. To understand student perceptions on key aspects of higher education;
2. To identify and prioritise students concerns in higher education.
3. To establish students' current conditions, how they impact on their learning and reflect the rest of society and policy.
4. To support student-based empirical research into student-identified issues of concern about their experience of higher education, obstacles highlighted in the research.
5. To encourage a reflective process of considering the findings of the student-based research in terms of what might be done to address them by various stakeholders (individual students; student government; local, national and academic associations; university administrations; university administration; government officials) and to support creative ways of presenting those findings for comment and further reflection to the various stakeholders.
6. To improve student engagement at the policy level through the use of empirical data and prepare the student researchers for a regional conference that will allow them to share their findings and to discuss the research and policy reflection process.
7. To support the documentation and reflection on the process as a whole by members of academic staff at the participating institutions, with a view to encouraging higher education policy research at universities in the region. In this way we anticipate making a contribution toward building the capacity of tertiary institutions in the implementation of research projects
8. To publish the student-based research, as well as the institutional documentation and reflection as a contribution to the building of higher education studies in the region.

Results from the project will prove that understanding student experiences and ideas and facilitating discussions among stakeholders can enhance efforts to improve university learning and teaching conditions.