Accessibility of Sino-African Educational Partnerships in Higher Education: History, Achievements, Challenges, and Directions

Background Of Sino-African Educational Partnerships

Since the establishment of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1949, higher education development and partnerships have been one attention in Chinese higher education policies; one of the locations being Africa (Jiang, 2013). In the Government level, the words such as “internationalization” and “partnerships” appear frequently in different higher education systems in China such as Ministry of Education admission system in mainland China (Ministry of Education, 2016) and Diploma of Secondary Education (Hong Kong university admission system since 2012) in Hong Kong (HKEAA, 2016). In institutional level, for instance, Peking University has been internationalizing itself by providing exchange programs with different foreign countries and recruiting different foreign students and professors (Peking University, 2016). In Hong Kong, for instance, The University of Hong Kong has been emphasizing internationalization as one major development agenda, by providing exchange programs for the international students and offering internship programs to foreign countries (The University of Hong Kong, 2016a). These policies can show that internationalization and partnerships are one major agenda in Chinese higher education. In scholastic level, Luo and Xu has pointed out new education development needs multiple forms of cooperation (2014). All the above documents (for example, The University of Hong Kong, 2016a) have shown that the internationalization of the accessibility to higher education is not only meant to internationalize a higher education institute within the national boundary, but also to show international influence in international arena of higher education. Because of this idea, the chapter serves as a sample to show how accessibility of different regions can be enhanced by examining how China and African countries work together in enhancing accessibility to higher education.

To begin with, the general development of Sino-African educational partnerships will be presented in terms of forms and numbers. In order to provide more analysis of the partnerships, three case studies of partnerships will be analyzed in depth.