University Of East London Nominated For Pieoneer Award

The University of East London (UEL) and partner Unicaf has been shortlisted as a finalist for The PIEoneer Awards 2023 Championing diversity, equity and inclusion award! This is in recognition of UEL and Unicaf’s development of a highly successful partnership delivering solutions to help resolve Africa’s higher education capacity challenge. Powered by Unicaf’s fully online, cutting-edge teaching and learning platform the partnership has resulted in over 6,000 registered students studying online by the end of 2022.

PIEoneer Awards 2023 logo
Africa’s higher education sector has significant capacity issues. There are far more school leavers who qualify for admission to universities than there are places. An annual shortage of 1.2 million positions exist in Nigeria alone. The creation of new bricks and mortar universities with 100,000 additional seats would need to be built every week for the next 10 years to fill the capacity gap across the continent of Africa.

The collaboration between UEL and Unicaf surpasses typical partnership expectations in a number of ways. In terms of scale, the partnership has attracted more than twice the number of students originally forecast. In addition, UEL and Unicaf have created a highly adaptable model of operation that enables students to enroll every month and advance from one module to the next at a speed that suits their needs.

By offering generous scholarships, flexible payment plans for students, and providing access-enabling technology like laptops to partnership students, accessibility and affordability are also improved. All of this has allowed the collaboration to quickly and effectively create a portfolio of programmes that are in high demand, allowing the partnership to flourish in ways that go above and beyond the norm.

We anticipate the results of the awards which will be announced at a hybrid (virtual and in-person) awards ceremony on Friday 22 September at Hilton Bankside, London.