Although the Bologna process is not without challenges, it may provide inspiration for the African continent, where proposals for the creation of an African Higher Education Area (AHEA) have been gaining ground for several years now.
Associations and regional subspaces such as East Africa amongst others consider higher education cooperation as a major hope for development.
The opportunities are clear:
to promote a type of academic and student mobility that will help to transform the brain drain into circulation within the region;
to improve the efficiency of university management; to harmonise the regulatory frameworks for higher education;
to promote syllabus reforms that bear in mind the priorities of development, both nationally and region-wide;
to make African higher education institutions more attractive in order to increase the recruitment of international students.
There are, however, specific difficulties and challenges in the African education region, such as a constant loss of human resources, low enrolment rates, a high degree of bureaucratic interference, slow privatisation of institutions, gender inequality, among others. Nevertheless,
the concept of AHEA will be dicussed at the next international conference, ‘The African universities adaptation to the Bologna Process’, 16-18 June at the University of Lubumbashi.
GUNI 
