Rolling out the African Continental Qualifications Framework

A giant step towards rolling out the African Continental Qualifications Framework (ACQF) has been taken. At a recent continental forum, the handover of the ACQF framework and related platform has been initiated to an ACQF network of African experts. The ACQF is an initiative of the African Union towards ensuring a harmonized qualification framework across the continent, which is funded by the European Union and implemented by the European Training Foundation. 

“We are now in a very interesting phase where the (ACQF) network is taking over, which is exciting and positive,” said Maria Rosenstock, ETF human capital development expert and coordinator for qualifications. The ETF has been implementing the €5 million initiative on behalf of the European Commission.

The Fifth ACQF Forum was held from 30 July to 1 August in Johannesburg, co-hosted by the ETF and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA). There, SAQA CEO Nadia Starr thanked the ETF “for the deliberate, careful and supported transition as we move from an entirely ETF-managed network to one that is managed by ourselves and for ourselves.

“These are the moments that our future will be built on. If we all find each other, we can forge a strong connected Africa for the next generation to traverse as they please,” said Starr.

In April the ACQF network elected its first presidency, with ETF support. It comprises the three heads of the national qualifications authorities in South Africa, Kenya and Zambia: SAQA’s Nadia Starr along with Kenya’s Dr Alice Kande and Mercy Ngoma of Zambia.

The forum was opened by Maud Vuyelwa Dlomo, deputy director-general of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, who pledged South Africa’s full support. “A continental qualifications framework is part of a broader pan-African vision that will allow Africans to have skills mobility and articulate their learning throughout the continent. The ACQF is indeed visionary,” she said.

Supporting Africa’s skills development

The ACQF is supporting the continent to respond to skills, mobility and development challenges, made all the more crucial by a burgeoning youth demography.

According to the United Nations: “By 2050, Africa’s youth population, already the largest in the world, is projected to double to over 830 million. The OECD reports that by the same year, the continent’s working-age population (15 to 64 years old) will rise from 849 million in 2024 to 1.56 billion, accounting for 85% of the global workforce increase.”

“It is estimated that between 10 and 12 million young Africans enter the labour market each year with only three million formal jobs available,” said Gianluca Azzoni, Head of Cooperation for the EU Delegation to the African Union. 

“Qualification frameworks are critical not only to ensure a clear definition within a country on which skills are required for certain occupations, but also to ensure that young people will be able to access opportunities for employment and study beyond their own borders.

“The ACQF will enhance the inclusiveness of qualifications, increase mobility of workers, support regional integration and enhance opportunities for exchange and improvements across AU member states. It will ultimately improve the lives of African citizens by increasing their access to decent work.

“The ACQF plays a critical role in the European Commission’s cooperation priorities. It is a policy of the African Union and has received strong support since its development as well as during its implementation at AU Member State level by the European Commission,” Azzoni said.

Indeed, the African Union has placed skills and professional mobility at the centre of its high-priority continental integration agenda, with the ACQF among a cluster of key instruments to make qualifications comparable, transparent and portable.

“Without effective credential recognition, Africa loses an estimated 10% to 15% of potential economic value from skilled labour mobility,” said Chigozie Emmanuel Okonkwo, Education and Skills development expert at the African Union Commission (AUC).

The ACQF must articulate with other AU strategic initiatives to facilitate the mobility of people so as to reap the benefits of integration, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the Continental TVET Strategy (CTVET Strategy), Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA) and its overarching PAQAF – Pan-African Quality Assurance and Accreditation Framework.

Phase I – Developing the ACQF

“Europe sees development as a long term process”, said Gianluca Azzoni. EU support to the ACQF is part of a broad portfolio in the education sector, under its €300 billion Global Gateway investment initiative. In fact the ACQF is part of the Youth Mobility for Africa Global Gateway Flagship initiative which has an overall budget envelope of 1 bn EUR which was launched at the AU-EU Summit in February 2022.  Education will also feature at the next AU-EU Summit which will take place in Luanda in November 2025.   

Developing and managing the ACQF in cooperation with the African Union is the ETF’s first continent-wide initiative and its biggest in Africa – but the ETF has a high level of expertise in qualifications. It is part of the European Qualification Framework Advisory Group, and has for years supported its partner countries in this area, including in North Africa.

ACQF Phase 1 was launched in September 2019 at African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and ran until 2022. It fell under theSkills Initiative for Africa (SIFA), funded by the EU and Germany.

“The first phase focused on conceiving the ACQF, building momentum around it across the continent, gathering stakeholders together, defining technical elements of the framework and the qualifications levels, and generating a lot of capacity building materials on establishment of national qualifications frameworks,” the ETF’s Maria Rosenstock explained.

The ACQF policy document was validated by African Union members states in July 2023. That meeting also launched the ACQF II implementation project, to run from 2023 to 2026. The focus of “Support to the Operationalisation of ACQF” is on implementing the ACQF, ensuring its sustainability and growing its uptake among African countries.

Phase II – Implementing the ACQF

Fortunately, the active ACQF network is looking to the future to ensure sustainable structures for an African-led network. The key is the active engagement of countries. As such, the network is up for the task. It has been built up over years and includes practitioners, qualifications bodies, authorities and others from around Africa. “These are people who know each other well, and trust each other,” said Rosenstock. “The network has in its hands great capacities, including to mobilise partners and advocate.”

The project is also building the necessary backbone infrastructure for the African framework. Together with the African Union and the network, the ETF will work on sustainable hosting of the digital infrastructure that the ACQF project has created.

Currently there are three digital tools: the ACQF website as well as the Qualifications and Credentials Platform (QCP), and skills and occupational profiles platforms. The QCP is a tool to share, exchange and compare information on national credentials and qualifications systems.

Another key element of the ACQF project is its AI-supported component around skills and jobs, which looks into the demand side for skills via digital dashboards. Three interactive dashboards cover Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Tunisia. First, the dashboard Common Occupational Profiles provides profiles of occupations, with a focus on skills, as well as data on global demand. Second, Online Job Ads Analysis provides data on labour market demand. A third, Green Dashboard Africa, provides analysis of green skills trends across sectors.

Expanding the ACQF footprint

There are multiple levels of qualifications frameworks: national, regional, and the ACQF. “No regional or continental framework can become operational unless there are national qualification frameworks (NQFs) at a sufficient stage of maturity to reference to the continental framework,” stressed Rosenstock.

“It’s about presenting countries’ national qualification systems in a common language, in terms of templates and quality standards. This allows mutual sharing and gradual building of trust.”

So alongside work with the ACQF network, the EFT has been assisting numerous countries to develop NQFs and Regional Qualifications Frameworks. Teams of ETF experts support countries and regions bilaterally. The countries include Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Sierra-Leone and Somalia.

On the national level, typical ETF support is to develop – jointly with stakeholders – policy for a NQF as well as for Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and credit accumulation and transfer systems. The next step is to produce handbooks for practitioners, continued Rosenstock:

“The ACQF project has put in place a big volume of capacity building materials, toolkits, training modules and other resources that explain all the elements necessary to start working on NQF policies.”

Moving ahead – The Johannesburg Forum

The new ACQF presidency took the lead at the Fifth ACQF Forum in Johannesburg. “We were in the back seat. That’s also how it will look like in the coming year,” Maria Rosenstock said. While the ACQF network is taking work over, it has not yet been decided where the ACQF’s ultimate physical home will be. This is an on-going discussion between partners.

Now that the network has a presidency and structures, priorities will be to expand and encompass more countries, and to look at formal registration. Participants also articulated the need for high-level political champions for the ACQF, to showcase success stories, and for countries to ratify more global and continental recognition and mobility conventions. 

Operational clusters were created in areas such as referencing and recognition, digitalisation, quality assurance, and collaboration and knowledge sharing. They are already up and going.

AUC expert Chigozie Emmanuel Okonkwo said a key takeaway for the Forum, in terms of the African Union position, is its firm belief that qualification mobility is essential for economic integration and development. “The African Union has developed strategic instruments that work together to create a comprehensive framework for qualification recognition and mobility.”

The key AU recommendations for advancing qualification mobility, he said, were the needs to: strengthen NQFs and align them with the ACQF; expand the scope of AfCFTA; invest in data systems and labour market intelligence; and recognise informal and experiential learning.

Drawing on remaining funding, the ETF will continue its support and will direct the activities of the ACQF II into the work of the clusters. A focus of the 2025 ACQF Forum was digitalisation and qualifications databases. At the next ACQF Forum, to be held in Mauritius in October 2025, there will also be more inputs on green skills.

The ACQF – Unifying Africa and Europe

The ACQF will be important not only in harmonising qualifications between African countries, but also between Africa and Europe, where referencing to the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) and updates to the referencing reports are an ongoing, continuous process. 

ETF qualifications expert Michael Graham, who worked in Brussels on developing the EQF, pointed to similarities and differences between it and the ACQF. For instance: “When the EQF was introduced in 2008, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Malta were the only countries in the European Union that had qualifications frameworks. In Africa, many existed already when the ACQF got underway, particularly countries in Southern and East Africa. Southern Africa especially has high-level qualifications expertise. So the starting point is different.” As the ACQF becomes increasingly operationalised, connecting the two could galvanise qualification mobility between Africa and Europe.

The supranational qualifications reach of the ACQF will help to harmonise, said Rosenstock. “In Africa there is more openness to the harmonisation agenda than in Europe.” Qualification frameworks provide a common language: “Then countries can speak in the same technical language about their differences.”

Language is a major barrier to communication in Africa, and the old colonial divisions into English, French and Portuguese also reflect differences in education systems that complicate an all-Africa qualifications system. Also in this sense, the ACQF is a unifying initiative.

In Johannesburg Maud Vuyelwa Dlomo, the deputy director-general, quoted former South African president Nelson Mandela, who said in 1997: “The power of education extends beyond the development of skills we need for economic success. It can contribute to nation-building and reconciliation.”