The DAAD, in October 2024, approved the African Centre for Career Enhancement and Skills Support (ACCESS) project at the SEPT Competence Center at Leipzig University for a second funding phase (2025 – 2029). Consequently, the implementation of this second phase of ACCESS was kicked off with a planning workshop held in Leipzig from 18 to 20 December 2024. The workshop converged the board members and coordinators from all the core ACCESS partner universities to prepare and lay a solid foundation to better execute the measures outlined in the project by all partners over the project period.
Picture: ACCESS Board members and Coordinators. Photo credit: ACCESS
With about €4.2 million in funding, ACCESS 2.0 will run from January 2025 to December 2029, shifting its focus from the competencies of lecturers and researchers to implementing measures that enhance the employability of students and graduates. ACCESS will collaborate with national and international organisations, business associations, companies, and NGOs to develop employability skills, facilitate labour market access such as university-business linkages for job fairs and training centres, and promote capacity building with study programmes and entrepreneurial education. About 50,000 bachelors, masters, and PhD students are expected to be impacted with innovative solutions through service learning approaches, and skills development modules to be implemented in partner countries. The project’s long-term impact will be significant, with the creation of an international masters consortium for student and lecturer exchange (mainly south-south), a postdoc programme (with at least 15 postdocs) and continued development of the ACCESS PhD programme (with 10 doctoral researchers) at Leipzig University. With a network expansion to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa University will be onboarded, thus growing the core network to include seven partner universities and one NGO, and an additional 42 African HEIs to be reached through the ACCESS networks. Furthermore, ACCESS will continue to incubate multi-actor partnerships and opportunities, particularly through the African Union and international organisations. The Ethiopia expansion strategically supports this effort.
Since 2020, the ACCESS consortium, comprising Leipzig University and six African partner universities[1], has been actively working towards its goal of addressing high unemployment rates among African university graduates. Partner universities/institutions in Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Tunisia have successfully implemented interventions to address high unemployment rates among African university graduates. By partnering with national and international actors, ACCESS developed interdisciplinary approaches to structural and methodological interventions upscaled to 32 additional universities. Over 3300 beneficiaries, reaching lecturers (580) and students, directly benefited from its initiatives. ACCESS supported about 20 African universities in developing transfer strategies and measures and created a publicly available wiki (www.wiki.access-centre.org) on skills development, e-teaching, and e-learning. Also, 12 PhD researchers were funded at Leipzig University, and 61 short-term research and practice-oriented projects were facilitated to explore dimensions of graduate employability in Africa. Some of these research results have been presented at 24 international conferences, contributing to 17 publications and fostering partnerships leading to three successful projects funded by BMBF, DAAD, and EU-Erasmus+. Additionally, about 30 start-up projects by students and lecturers were supported through the African German Entrepreneurship Academy (AGEA) to develop their projects further.
ACCESS is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) under the “Higher Education Excellence in Development Cooperation (exceed)” programme. With “exceed”, the DAAD supports establishing international university networks on four continents with funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). More information about ACCESS is available at www.access-centre.org.
[1] African partner universities are IRGIB Africa University, Benin; Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana; Mount Kenya University, Kenya; University of Ibadan, Nigeria; INES-Ruhengeri, Rwanda; and University of Tunis, Tunisia.