ACCREDITATION
BIOGRAPHIES Joseph Sekhampu is chief director of the North-West University (NWU) Business School in South Africa. He is an economist with a focus on political economy, public policy and institutional reform in South Africa Geraldine Meyers is accreditation manager at the NWU Business School. Her work focuses on aligning institutional systems, evidence and academic practice to meet global standards
operational disruptions that alter both pace and direction. Accreditation, then, introduces a discipline that requires institutions to return repeatedly to the ensuing gaps between aims and actualisation – not as a failure of planning, but as a condition of practice. The task is not to eliminate the gap, but to manage it deliberately, ensuring that intent remains connected to what is ultimately experienced in teaching and learning environments. What accreditation reveals The points above highlight how contexts such as those found across Africa do not simply adapt accreditation frameworks. Instead, they deepen them by exposing what those frameworks require when coherence cannot be assumed and where alignment must be actively produced rather than administratively maintained. In such environments, accreditation ceases to operate as a confirmatory exercise and becomes a site where the underlying demands of quality are rendered visible in their most exacting form. The implications here extend beyond regional experience to the broader practice of accreditation itself. If accreditation is intended to assure quality, then its most revealing tests are unlikely to be found in environments of institutional stability, where systems function predictably and alignment is embedded. They are more likely to be found in contexts of constraint, where discontinuity and fragmentation compel business schools to generate coherence through deliberate effort rather than inherit it from structure. In other words, a fuller understanding of accreditation may not derive from settings where systems function as intended but where they must be made to function. In such settings, quality cannot be assumed, inherited or administratively secured; it must be constructed, defended and continuously reproduced through institutional effort. At the NWU Business School, it has become
Constructing & sustaining coherence These distinctions reframe what accreditation tests. It is not only whether standards are met, but also whether institutions possess the capabilities required to make those standards real under conditions of complexity. Such capabilities are not generic or easily transferable. Instead, they are shaped by the specific demands imposed by fragmentation, constraint and institutional discontinuity, revealing themselves most clearly where coherence cannot be assumed. One of these capabilities lies in the deliberate construction of alignment across fragmentation. Where authority is dispersed and institutional systems are uneven, coherence does not emerge organically from structure. It must be negotiated across faculties, administrative units and stakeholder groups, often in the absence of fully integrated systems. This requires more than mere co-ordination; it demands an ongoing institutional effort to reconcile competing priorities, establish shared reference points and sustain alignment even as underlying conditions shift. A closely related capability revolves around the continued linking of evidence to practice across distributed systems. In more stable environments, data, decision-making and implementation are often tightly coupled. In more complex settings, however, these relationships are less assured and evidence risks becoming descriptive rather than directive. When taken seriously, accreditation in this context compels institutions to build the connective pathways through which evidence informs teaching, curriculum design and strategic adjustment. The challenge is not simply to produce data, but also to ensure that it travels, is interpreted consistently and is acted on in ways that are visible and defensible. A further capability emerges in the continuous negotiation between intent and enactment. Institutional strategies rarely unfold as designed. Invariably, they encounter resource constraints, policy shifts and
increasingly evident that alignment is not something that resides in formal structures alone. Instead, it is something that must be continuously produced through interaction, interpretation and co-ordination across the institution. Moments that appear settled at the level of design often reveal themselves, in practice, to be contingent on how consistently they were enacted across programmes, teams and decision points. For us, this has shifted the focus from demonstrating that systems exist to understanding how they behave over time, how evidence circulates and is acted on and where small disconnections accumulate into larger forms of misalignment. The experience has, therefore, introduced a more exacting view of quality, not as something that can be secured through periodic review, but as something that depends on sustained institutional attentiveness. This encompasses the capacity to notice where coherence weakens, respond deliberately and maintain alignment in conditions of complexity and continuous pressure.
Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2026 39
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