Established since 1994, the Intra-African Exchange Program (IAEP) was designed to help African ministries of education use existing regional capacities in order to learn from each other’s innovations and solutions to common educational challenges. For African education professionals, IAEP can be a precious source of expertise.

How IAEP works

The program sponsors:

• Study visits and exchanges of educational personnel between African countries, thereby enabling experience to be shared among them.

• Missions by senior African educational professionals to provide advice and technical assistance.

Ministries wishing to take part in this program should submit a request to the ADEA Secretariat or to the ministry of the country they wish to visit or from which they seek professional assistance. The applicant ministry may either receive a visit from a specialist or send one of its own staff to another country.

Exchanges so far

The Intra-African Exchange Program (IAEP) exists since 1994. The Prospective, Stock-taking Review of Education in Africa launched by ADEA in 1999, accelerated the requests for exchanges by providing African countries with a long menu of innovations and experiences from which to learn. The 26 country case studies which were presented at the 1999 Biennial Meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, have now been widely disseminated through a report, What Works and What’s New in Education: Africa Speaks!. Immediately after, five countries (Benin, Djibouti, The Gambia, Chad and Zanzibar) seeking to learn from experiences in Guinea, Namibia, Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, approached ADEA in order for it to facilitate study visits to these countries.

ADEA Working Groups have also facilitated intra-African exchanges. The wealth and breadth of the knowledge and capacities they have developed over the past ten years are increasingly useful as the basis for such exchanges. African experts, trained or identified by the WGs, have provided much needed support to policy formulation and capacity-building processes on the continent.

A list of study trips financed by IAEP between 1996 and 2002 is shown in the table below.

IAEP study visits and exchanges (1996 - 2002)