The African Academia Conference & Awards have been conceptualized by The Business Executive Media Group and will now be organized by same. The entire event will comprise a two day conference which will be participated in by the award winners, certain other key members of Africa’s academia and carefully selected stakeholders; which culminate in the awards conferment ceremony itself.

The awards are for tertiary institutions who offer academically inclined courses so most categories are for universities, Very limited categories are for polytechnics, a genre of tertiary educational institutions which is more practical than academic but which are known to sometimes contribute to the expanding knowledge base which is at the core of academia and consequently these awards. The remaining categories are for specialized research driven institutions, managed and operated by academics, but whose primary purpose is unearthing new knowledge rather than imparting already known facts and perspectives to students seeking such knowledge.

The awards seek to identify and publicly recognize individuals and institutions who have excelled in their academic pursuits and/or the management of such tertiary level academic institutions and research-based organizations. Thus awards will be conferred on both individuals and their Awardees will be brought together along with certain selected stakeholders to participate in the two day conference during which expertize, experience and relevant perspectives and ideas will be shared with regards to both the academic pursuit of knowledge and how the institutions that facilitate this pursuit are managed.

Participation at the conference will be strictly by invitation with awardees forming the primary group of participants. Several technical presentations will be delivered by eminent persons in academia as well as representatives of stakeholder institutions in the academia. Questions related to the presentations will be answered by the resource people and the topics addressed will form the topics for subsequent group discussions.

Time will also be allocated on the second day for networking among participants. This will include one on one meetings – facilitated by the event organizers - between academics and between them and service providers in attendance.

Awardees will be determined by expert assessment since the general public lacks the technical expertize to assess the nominees with adequate levels of accuracy and so if allowed to vote they would expectedly resort to emotional considerations in arriving at their voting decisions.

Expert assessment will be done both by our specially constituted Awards Selection Jury comprising eminent academics, executive managers of foremost academic institution and representatives of leading support service providers and by our contracted research consultants whose work will provide the quantitative foundation on which the Awards Selection Jury will do its qualitative assessments. Both will be closely guided by our selection criteria which forms the basis for our quantitative scoring system which will be used to evaluate each nominee.

The entire election process is comprehensive, scientific and therefore credible.

Both self-nominations and third party nominations can be accepted, Importantly, no fees are chargeable for nominations or for actual awards conferment. However, a small participation fee will be charged each participant to subsidize the organizers costs with regards to logistics, event souvenirs, lunch and coffee/cocoa breaks, cocktails etc. Awardees may opt to attend the conference virtually, in which case the participation fee would be lowered further. However, this would inevitably reduce the intensity of participation and contributions to the discussions and even more importantly, would deprive the awardee of the huge networking opportunities presented by physical presence.

Irrespective of whether an awardee attends the conference in person or virtually, they are required to receive their awards physically, this being the only term and condition for conferment of the award. Awards will be conferred at the five star gala awards conferment ceremony in the form of a buffet dinner accompanied by live entertainment. This event is billed as the largest pan African gathering of top tier participants in the academia industry to date.

This conference and accompanying awards scheme are being financed primarily by corporate/institutional sponsors. Opportunities are still available in this regard.