Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA) is a UK charity aiming to improve educational outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa from school level through to universities. 

IDEMS’s extensive knowledge and experience of higher education in Africa led to a project supported by ESSA to understand the teaching of statistics in higher education institutions across Africa.

With an initial focus on five countries: Kenya, Niger, Rwanda, Botswana and Ghana, IDEMS is conducting a mixture of general and in-depth studies in these countries to be able to present to an international audience the current needs, depth and complexity of issues around statistics education, as well as representing the rich diversity across countries.

This work continues into next year, and by May 2019 IDEMS will release one-page fact sheets on all five countries and in-depth reports on Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana after in depth study of all universities offering statistics degrees within the country.

We feel this project is important because once the findings are openly accessible, they will illustrate some of the diversity which exists across the continent and enable international partners to identify common issues which they could contribute to. This work will be used to inform IDEMS community work related to strengthening statistics in African higher education.