INQAAHE Forum 2026 – Sun City (South Africa)

During the 2024 General Assembly Meeting held in Bucharest (Romania) under the frame of INQAAHE Forum 2024, proposals to host this event were formally presented by the different applying agencies. The INQAAHE members later on electronically voted for Forum 2026 to take place in Sun City (South Africa), hosted by the Council on Higher Education (CHE).

The proposed venue of the Forum is the Sun City Convention Centre, located within the Sun City resort complex.

The Forum will be held under the theme “Quality Assurance as an Impactful Tool for Tertiary Education Today and Tomorrow“.

This Forum will examine the impact of QA in ensuring quality amid expanding access to tertiary education, particularly across the African continent. It will specifically:

• Reflect on how QA frameworks and practices can uphold standards in systems underupwards or downwards demographic pressure, and balance access and attraction goals with meaningful quality outcomes for diverse learners.
• Delve into how QA can act as a driver of innovation, inclusion, and sustainability—both within higher education and across broader societal contexts.

As tertiary education faces unprecedented global, political, technological, and social shifts, quality assurance must rise to meet the challenges—not only to maintain standards but to lead the change in shaping more equitable, resilient, and future-ready systems. This Forum invites quality assurance professionals, policymakers, educators, students, institutional leaders, professional bodies and employers to engage in a forward-looking dialogue on the impact of QA in diverse and dynamic contexts.

❖ Subtopic 1: Building trust in quality assurance systems across stakeholders. This subtopic will examine how trust in QA can be fostered at multiple levels: governments, institutions, students, and employers. It will consider how QA can enable responsible autonomy, build confidence in internal and external processes, and counteract credential mills and superficial accountability mechanisms. Particular attention will be paid to how QA bodies can earn legitimacy through transparency, maturity, and stakeholder engagement, and to the role QA bodies can play in respect to the increasing prevalence of fraudulent qualifications, misuse of honorary titles, and to threats to academic integrity in higher education.

❖ Subtopic 2: Enhancing the social and labor market relevance of macro and microcredentials through QA. This subtopic will explore the intersection of qualifications, micro-credentials, quality assurance, and social and labor market needs. It will address how QA can ensure the value and recognition of higher education learning through qualifications and micro-credentials, not only for learners but also for employers and industry actors and for responsiveness to critical social challenges at local and global level. Discussions will spotlight international collaborations, consortium models, and emerging practices including cross-border accreditation or recognition across Africa and beyond.

❖ Subtopic 3: Leveraging technology and AI to strengthen impactful quality assurance. This subtopic will assess how technological advancements, including generative AI, can improve QA practices, enable data-driven decision-making, and support agile responses to educational innovation. It will explore the digitalization of QA systems, the integrity of online learning, and how new tools can enhance both monitoring and learning outcomes as well as the integration and responsible use of AI tools in QA processes.

❖ Subtopic 4: Widening access and growing participation while safeguarding quality. This subtopic will examine the impact of QA in ensuring quality amid expanding access to tertiary education, particularly across the African continent, and to growing participation in contexts where the higher education system is challenged through rapidly decreasing participation It will reflect how QA frameworks can uphold standards in systems under demographic pressure, and balance access goals with meaningful quality outcomes for diverse learners.

Call for Proposals

INQAAHE extends an invitation for proposals for the upcoming INQAAHE Forum 2026. 

The INQAAHE Forum is conversation-driven and practice-oriented. It is designed as a collaborative space where interaction takes precedence. The Forum aims to spark dialogue, foster co-creation, and provide participants with tangible tools, frameworks, and ideas they can apply in their own contexts. For this reason, participants are expected to deliver engaged and interactive sessions.

At the Forum, we value shared experience over formal expertise. Whether you are an academic, a QA professional, a student, an employer, or a policymaker, you are invited to contribute your perspective and actively engage in shaping collective solutions.

We are especially keen to receive proposals that:

• Use concrete, real-life examples from quality assurance work
• Encourage participation, co-creation, and problem-solving
• Involve stakeholders beyond academia, such as students and employers
• Highlight transferability of QA practices across regions and contexts
• Demonstrate facilitation skills and foster open dialogue

Further details on the application process and selection criteria are available in the official call. 

CALL FOR PROPOSALS