ADESFA 3 programme: employability and professional opportunities for African graduates

The MEAE has tasked France Éducation international (FEI) with managing and monitoring all of these projects, which fall under the ADESFA programme [1].

Developing African higher education together

The ADESFA programme is a means for developing university cooperation between France and Africa. It helps develop French higher education in Southern and Eastern Africa and the Maghreb.  The first two editions (2019–2021 and 2020–2022) involved a series of projects that supported academic cooperation initiatives between eighteen French and twenty-four African higher education institutions. 

This programme is designed to promote the sharing of knowlege and the development of innovative teaching models, with the intention of mutually strengthening French and African partner higher education institutions around three key areas of cooperation:

• Implementing international partnership degrees (study abroad degrees, double degrees),
• Developing digital education (distance learning, hybrid format, etc.)
• Expanding capacity through support for the pedagogical, administrative and financial structuring of local offerings.

This third edition of the ADESFA programme aims to promote French pedagogical engineering and to jointly develop the educational offering with African academic partners, with the core objective of making young graduates more employable and ensuring that they have more professional opportunities. The programme is centered on the recent and growing demand for vocational training in African countries (bachelor of technology, vocational bachelor’s, vocational master’s, etc.).

From project conceptualisation to evaluation

As the managing body of the ADESFA programme, France Éducation international maintains regular contact with the various project leaders to provide support and advice in implementing measures. FEI has a diverse role: in addition to its communication and information work on programme procedures and deadlines, FEI plays an active part in the conceptualisation of each project, whether in defining objectives (phases, indicators, participants), pooling knowledge (quantification/standardisation of activities) or overseeing the quality objectives of the educational content to ensure it is beneficial.

[1] ADESFA: a start-up fund to support projects to develop French higher education in Southern and Eastern Africa and the Maghreb.