HEA Director-General Calls on HEIs to Make Quality Assurance a Habit, Not a Badge
The Director-General of the Higher Education Authority (HEA), Professor Kazhila C. Chinsembu, has said that quality assurance must cease to be treated as a procedural label and instead become a living institutional habit embedded in the daily culture of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
Professor Chinsembu was speaking at the five (5)-day QAMIS orientation workshop taking place at Sandy’s Creation Resort in Chilanga, where HEA is training Quality Assurance and IT officers from 50 HEIs on the use of its new online accreditation system.
“Quality assurance is not just a badge that you should wear,” he said. “Quality assurance should become a virtue. It should become part of your organisational culture and part of your organisational psychology.”
The Director-General stressed that institutions should not experience quality assurance as something externally imposed by the regulator, but as an internal discipline that shapes how they think, plan and deliver education every day.
“That is the deeper beauty of the Quality Assurance Management Information System, it is not simply a digital platform for processing applications, but an instrument for institutionalising a stronger culture of quality, faster feedback, sharper programme design, and more accountable academic delivery,” he said.
Professor Chinsembu said that the Authority wants HEIs to feel quality assurance in their everyday operations so that higher education in Zambia becomes more relevant, more responsive and more capable of producing graduates who are assets to the economy rather than liabilities to it.
Through QAMIS, HEA is seeking to build a higher education system in which quality is not occasional, cosmetic or forced, but normal.
The QAMIS training workshop is being held from Monday, 23rd to Friday, 27th March, 2026, with the system having been developed by the SMART Zambia Institute in collaboration with the HEA development team led by Mr. Francis Kawesha, Senior Information Technology Officer.
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