INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION OF THE ECAQA

The Eurasian Centre for Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education and Health Care is a full member of the Asia-Pacific Quality Network (APQN) (https://www.apqn.org/members/directory, https://www.apqn.org/aqpn-members/list/alpha/e)

The Asia-Pacific Quality Network was established in 2003 in Hong Kong (China) and now has 150 members from 43 countries and 50 quality assurance agencies. This network is one of the youngest and most actively developing in the world. APQN is facilitated by the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) and funded by the World Bank.

Since 2009, the operational headquarters of APQN has been based at the Shanghai Education Evaluation Institute, PRC.

In 2009, the APQN General Assembly was held in Hanoi, Republic of Vietnam, and hosted the conference on Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Balancing the National Contexts and International Aspirations, which addressed the issues of internal quality assurance systems in higher education institutions, national and regional quality assurance networks, building qualifications systems as well as quality assurance issues in transnational education.

The conference continued to develop a document regulating processes and procedures for internal and external quality assurance in higher education, called the Chiba Principles (based on the name of the city in Japan that hosted last year's APQN General Assembly where the document was presented for the first time). The Chiba Principles serve as a guide for building national quality assurance systems in APQN member countries, similar to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) developed by ENQA.

Prof. Dr. Jianxin Zhang is the 5th and 6th President (2016-2019; 2019-2022) of APQN.

How does this benefit educational organisations:

• Quality assurance of the institutional and programme accreditation procedure.
• Conducting international accreditation with the participation of APQN members.