1. Coordination of quality assurance and local stakeholder management
   
   Education White Paper 3 (reference: Education White Paper 3: A Programme for the Transformation of Higher Education) assigns responsibility for coordinating quality assurance in higher education to the HEQC. The organisation is therefore required to facilitate a common approach to quality assurance in collaboration with the other bodies concerned, such as professional councils and sector education and training authorities (SETAs); and to ensure that duplication of quality assurance activities in higher education is avoided. This can involve sharing information and quality assurance systems, and in some instances entering into formal agreements or memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with other bodies whose scope of practice in quality assurance in higher education overlaps with that of the HEQC.
   
   The Executive Director's office manages relations with local stakeholders including higher education institutions and their associations, government departments and the business and student fraternity.



2. Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Statutory Professional Bodies
   
   The Council on Higher Education (CHE) and the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to advance the objectives of the Higher Education Act, 1997 (Act 101 of 1997) and the National Qualifications Framework Act, 2008 (Act 67 of 2008).
   
   The two statutory bodies will jointly cooperate in performing quality assurance functions relating to engineering qualifications. This includes the accreditation of engineering programmes as well as monitoring and evaluation of engineering education at higher education institutions.
   
   Through the MoU, ECSA and the CHE have established a framework. Click here for more information.



3. International relations
   
   The HEQC recognises that its work must be informed by international debates on developments in quality assurance in higher education, and that the organisation can contribute significantly to such debates. Relationships with quality assurance agencies in the African continent and internationally are key to the HEQC's achieving this objective. For this reason, the organisation has over the past five years established Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA), the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) in the UK, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in India, the Namibian Qualifications Authority (NQA) and the Tertiary Education Council (TEC) in Botswana.
   
   The HEQC will continue to establish relationships with quality agencies internationally, sharing information with countries entering the discourse of quality assurance for the first time, and participating in a coordinated fashion in international debates on higher education.
   
   The most recent MoU was signed with the CHE-Lesotho on 16 October 2012. Click here for more information.



4. The Higher Education Quality Committee Information System (HEQCIS)
   
   One of the responsibilities of the HEQC is to collect from its accredited providers data on student enrolment and achievement, in the format prescribed by the HEQC in consultation with the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA). The HEQC then submits this data to SAQA for inclusion in the National Learners' Records Database (NLRD).
   
   The HEQCIS is the system developed by the HEQC to enable this data to be collected. Data from public providers does not form part of the HEQCIS as this is sent directly by these institutions to the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). After being processed by the Department's Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS), it is submitted to SAQA.
   
   HEQCIS can be accessed at: www.che.ac.za/heqcisinfo.