The Pan African University Planning and Coordination Meeting May 2019
From 16 to 17 May 2019, was held in Nairobi, Kenya, the second Pan African University (PAU) Planning and Coordination Meeting of the Year 2019. Presided over by the acting Rector of the PAU, the meeting aimed to present an update on the current status and new developments in all the PAU institutes, provide information on financial issues, including the 2020 budget, updates of the video conference with AfDB and a briefing on the 2018 Audit, enlighten the audience on the new PAU Communication Strategy, and discuss the curriculum review and revision as well as the new Call for applications for the 2019/2020 Academic year.
At the end of this two-day meeting, several resolutions were made and are presented in essence as follows:
The meeting recommended that all Graduations across institutes shall be held in November 2019 at the latest. It further urged institutes to send to the Rector (Statistics), lists of continuing and newly-admitted students by year of study, gender, programmes, nationality, charted on a graph by 24 May 2019 and to fast track the implementation of the PAVEU Roadmap in order to be able to do the launching by September 2019.
Other recommendations included issues regarding top-up allowance which should be related to that of staff secondment as released by host institution, and the report by institutes on financial contributions of the host government (with clear figures per year and other expenditures since the beginning of the programmes).
A series of agreements were also made including the agreement that issues of repeating students should be taken up seriously in a separate meeting with all Institute Director; as well as include in the students’ contract, a provision stipulating that students who abandon their studies for unjustifiable reasons, should be compelled to refund the scholarship stipends granted to them and shall not be issued a return ticket to their country of residence. In addition, tentative dates were agreed on for the graduation of students. They are: last week of September for PAUWES, 15-17 November for PAULESI, last week of November for PAUSTI and 20-21 December for PAUGHSS.