Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard
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Date
2007
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Abstract
This three and a half year ESRC-DFID funded project (RES-167-25-0078) ‘Widening
Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard’
is a new evidence base contributing to making higher education more socially inclusive in
sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wphegt). It is a mixed methods study
of one public and one private case study university in each country, combining:
200 student life history interviews, comprising interviews with 119 students from public
universities and 81 from private universities, registered on different programmes and
with a diversity of backgrounds including under-represented groups such as women,
mature, low socio-economic status and disabled students. Students were asked about
their experiences of primary, secondary and higher education, with questions about their
motivations, transitions, support, decision-making and first impressions of higher
education, its impact on them and their future plans.
200 key staff and policymakers interviews, comprising 172 semi-structured interviews
with senior academics, lecturers and staff working closely with students in the four
case study institutions and 28 interviews with policymakers. Academic staff and
policymakers were asked about policies, interventions, strategies and challenges for
widening participation, and the part that their universities had played in working towards
the Millennium Development Goals.
100 Equity Scorecards compiled largely from raw data on admission/access, retention,
completion and achievement, for four programmes of study in relation to three
structures of inequality: gender, socio-economic status (SES) and age.
The research questions included: investigating which social groups are currently and traditionally
under-represented as students in the case study institutions and whether these correlate with wider
national and international patterns of social exclusion; how the case study institutions are
interpreting and responding to the Millennium Development Goals; and if there is a
relationship between learners’ prior experiences of education, their socioeconomic backgrounds
and their experiences and achievement in education. Questions have also been posed about what
mechanisms for support have been put in place for ‘nontraditional’ students to facilitate retention
and achievement and how ‘non-traditional’ students might experience these interventions (see
Appendix 1). Diverse stakeholders have been asked about their perceptions of the main
barriers to participation for under-represented
groups and what strategies the case study institutions can develop to improve the recruitment,
retention and achievement of students from non-traditional backgrounds.
Via the field work and its analysis, the project has produced statistical data on patterns of
participation, retention and achievement and has aimed to build theory about socio-cultural
aspects of higher education in Ghana and Tanzania.
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Morley, L., Leach, F., Lugg, R., Lihamba, A., Opare, J., Bhalalusesa, E., Forde, L.D., Egbenya, G. and Mwaipopo, R., 2007. Widening participation in higher education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an equity scorecard. University of Sussex, Brighton.