The World Bank Board has approved a mega project meant to strengthen selected higher institutions of learning in Eastern and Southern Africa to deliver quality postgraduate education and build collaborative research capacity in priority areas.

The Eastern and Southern Africa Higher Education Centres of Excellence Project (ACE II), expected to close in 2021, will see each of the 24 Africa Centres of Excellence (ACE) funded to a tune of $6 million over five years.

The project is good news for the regional higher learning institutions which are grappling with poor quality education due to limited research funding.

Since the project will focus on supporting collaborative research, it is a step forward in fixing quality challenges in higher institutions of learning.

If well implemented, the project will significantly enhance the quality of education in the region and this will reduce on the number of people who travel out of the region in search for better education.

 The Uganda-based IUCEA, an East African Community (EAC) institution responsible for coordinating the development of higher education and research, is the regional facilitation unit for the ACE II project.

The EAC member countries should collaborate to ensure that IUCEA benefits all the member countries within the framework of fast tracking the integration process.

Education is a key component in the integration process and having quality education in all member countries will go along away in fulfilling the goals of the integration.

By the time the project concludes in 2021, the centre should have developed sufficient capacity to become a sustainable regional hub for training and research to address priority development challenges in the region.

However, this should be supplemented by the harmonization of the education policies among the EAC member countries to ensure that specific development challenges facing the region are addressed collectively.