APA Bangui (Central Africa) The 25th ordinary session of the Council of Ministers of the African and Malagasy Council for Higher Education (CAMES), which opened Wednesday in Bangui, ended Thursday, APA noted here.

The session’s theme was "Regional poles of excellence, approach, quality and financing."

"We have the ambition and the pressing duty to get a CAMES higher education ministers’ declaration on the acceptance of the paradigm of quality assurance," the current chairman ofMES Council of Ministers and Gabonese higher education minister, Dieudonne Pambo, declared Wednesday.

According to Pambo, the quality assurance in question guarantees the reliability of excellence and must be considered in a community and interdependence context.

"Because beyond the internal evaluations of our own higher education systems, our programmes and their national employability, the quality assurance should resolutely integrate the concepts of mobility, interdependence, ways of confrontation and putting in competition our universities and higher schools," he underlined.

Mr. Pambo said the acceptance of the paradigm of quality assurance is a constraint and a reference which implies "a true Community university space which mechanisms, types of synergy and functional partnership should be defined."

On his part, the Central African Prime Minister, Pr Faustin Archange Touadera, was pleased that after forty years of existence "CAMES became indeed the label and a space of regional integration."

"Our universities are looking for excellence, which is the only way likely to give them the ability to solve the challenges which their societies are faced with, with poverty and misery in the forefront," Touadera averred, deploring the weak participation of Central African lecturers and researchers in CAMES competitions.

A meeting of experts preceded the 25th CAMES Council of Ministers’ meting, with the experts starting their meeting on Monday in Bangui, to prepare the files of the ministerial conference.