Reframing Quality Assurance in South African higher education by navigating challenges and seizing opportunities

While Quality Assurance (QA) is widely promoted as a mechanism to uphold academic standards, it often reflects Eurocentric models misaligned with the socio-historical realities of institutions in the Global South. In South Africa, QA operates within a deeply unequal higher education landscape marked by apartheid legacies, bureaucratic rigidity, and systemic underfunding. This paper adopts a decolonial lens to critically examine the limitations and reform possibilities of QA in South African higher education. Using a qualitative design, the study analyses the Council on Higher Education’s 2024 institutional audit of a South African university, alongside a targeted review of scholarship on QA and decolonial higher education governance. The paper advances a decolonial critique that positions QA not as a neutral, technical process but as a contested terrain shaped by knowledge hierarchies. It examines challenges at systemic, institutional, and individual levels and identifies reform pathways to support a reimagined, developmental approach to QA that foregrounds epistemic justice, institutional context, and participatory governance. This includes greater recognition of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, equity-oriented transformation priorities, and hybrid models that balance international accountability demands with locally grounded conceptions of quality. In repositioning QA beyond narrow compliance, the paper contributes to debates on how it can be locally grounded and globally engaged without replicating colonial hierarchies.