The conception and understanding of quality and quality assurance (QA) need to be broadened in all industries, institutions, civil society and organizations, institutions, companies, schools, hotels, and hospitals, among others. Transformational change & development requires that our organizations and institutions be guided by the principles of quality assurance. The organizational design mindsets must be shifted from being anchored on the 1890s hierarchical structures of Taylorism, Fayolism, and Weberism (TFW virus) to the emergent collaborative, performance-based systems of the 21^st Century.

Dr. Violet Makuku is actively engaged in leading transformational change & development through fostering quality and the quality culture through education, awareness and institutional assessments and evaluations for self-improvement through assurance across the African continent and beyond. Broadly and with a focus on fostering digital transformation in Africa, Dr. Makuku’s work embeds organizational development (OD) concepts, principles, and values to build an excellent quality culture of hard work, productivity, and sustainability. Such a culture is pivotal to socio-economic transformation and development at institutional/organizational/company/civil society, national, regional, continental and global levels. The vision is to see the uptake, adoption, adaptation of OD and QA values by all forms of organizations, institutions, industries as well as service providers like banks and hospitals, among others.

There is no doubt that building an excellent corporate quality culture through OD and QA while aligning that culture with the organization’s mission and vision will go a long way in improving the workplace environment, experience, job satisfaction and sustainability. The OD and QA built quality culture, naturally ensures that personnel and the leadership, work through agile business processes that are built to be collaborative and responsive to contemporary and current issues which makes the company/organization/institution relevant, all the time. The optimal use of self as a tool for the needed change within the parameters of the OD values and principles which include collaboration and decisions based on research results should be underscored. The benefits of building and practicing the OD quality culture in a company/organization/institution are many and they include continuous development that yield increased productivity and efficiency, better horizontal and vertical communication, employee growth, better profit margins, among others with excellent services and end products.

Dr. Makuku’s Educational Foundation – Rising to shine as a QA and OD Practitioner

The Aristotelian 2^nd Legacy advocates for the integration of universals (theory) and the particulars (experience and practice) – as the basis for true knowledge. To foster transformational change & development, practitioners need “phronesis” which, according to Aristotle, is the integration of experience, craft, and theory as well as practical knowledge. In that regard, as a scholar-practitioner, Dr. Makuku’s forte is in appealing to scientific knowledge and her strength is in uncovering the generalized principles and explanatory reasons that may underlie a situation derived from the larger scientific discourse that incorporates multiple contexts and experiences. This has been demonstrated through her work in general and the numerous quality assurance capacity building activities which are normally bot Face-to-Face and Online. Dr Makuku’s competencies can be understood better through her qualifications, as a prelude to understanding, specialisms, mastery levels, and approaches as a transformational change & development practitioner.

Dr. Violet Makuku holds a PhD in Quality Assurance (QA) in University Education from the University of South Africa (UNISA, SA); MScEd-Curriculum Studies & a BSc Geography Honours, both from Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE, ZIM); Diploma in Secondary Education, Gweru Teachers’ College (GTC, ZIM). She is a former Higher Education (HE) QA Specialist who has widened her scope of coverage to include all the other sectors like industry, hotels, schools, hospitals, among others. She is a former Diplomat and The Harmonization of African Quality Assurance and Accreditation (HAQAA) Initiative Project Manager at The Association of African Universities (AAU), Accra, Ghana. She has been engaged as a keynote speaker, special guest of Honour and leader of panel discussions in many international events. These include the Ho Technical University Vice Chancellor’s inaugural lecture in 2018, the June, 2019 Egypt International Conference on Quality Assurance that was organized by The National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation Education (NAQAAE), the August 2019 1st National Quality Assurance Conference for the Namibia HE organized by the Namibia National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), the 7th African Regional Conference of Vice Chancellors and Deans of Science, Education, Engineering and Technology (COVIDSET) November, 2019, Guest Speaker of the South Africa’s 2020 GARMIN Quality Assurance Forum, 3-4 September and many more.

Practice & Intervention Design – Supporting Individuals, Organizations, and Communities

Practitioners should effectively support clients and client systems through the design of change strategies that foster high performance. As is the essence of OD and QA, transformational change & development practitioners must design interventions that elevate humanity and bring presence to human systems.

Dr. Makuku designed and facilitated continental workshops for HE personnel to address QA challenges in HE Teaching/Learning, QA, Research and “Building the Quality Culture” in many African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda, to name a few countries. Since June 30, 2020, Dr Violet Makuku rolled out Quality Assurance Virtual Workshops to support Higher & Tertiary Education communities to incorporate digitized technologies in assuring quality of research, teaching and learning, community engagement and all aspects. Dr Makuku wrote a QA book chapter for RUFORUM’s continental textbook on Tertiary Agriculture Education which was published in 2021. She does consultancy on HE QA issues and contributes QA articles to the University World News (UWN) Editions.

She has done numerous institutional evaluations for improvement in many African countries including South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda’s HE institutions. Dr Makuku is an external programme reviewer for numerous National Accreditation Boards/Councils for HE in different African countries as well as for the Commonwealth of Learning programmes and modules. She is also an external examiner for Masters & PhD dissertations and theses for a number of African universities. In March 2022, she was one of the members of a special selection committee that reviewed more than 30 proposals on the dissemination of quality assurance information that were submitted to the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD) for funding.

Before joining AAU as a Diplomat for the HAQAA Initiative, Dr. Makuku was a Director QA at the Bindura University of Science Education, Zimbabwe and a former university lecturer for at least 11 years in the same institution. She is also engaged as reviewer of many journals including the International Journal of Educational Policy Research and Review (IJPRR), African Educational Research Journal (AERJ), the African Education Review, the Online Journal of African Affairs and the African Educational Research Journal (AEJR) for Net Journals. She has been widely involved in University QA activities including research supervision and designing of University QA courses/modules. She also has a lot of experience in the designing and development of QA monitoring and evaluation mechanisms and instruments/tools. She presented papers during workshops and conferences during international conferences in many countries across the globe. She was the Southern African Development Community (SADC) representative for QA in internship and external assessor for the University of South Africa (UNISA) for more than 5 years. Dr Makuku was also an external assessor and QA expert for the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Teacher Education for many years.

OD and QA Competencies & Specialisms

As a transformational change & development practitioner in quality assurance, Dr. Makuku exhibits the 11 OD competencies of consulting processes, contextual acumen, culture work, life-long learning, relationship with others, systems navigation, the Use of Self, theory & practice, working with change, working with diversity, inclusion, equality and equity, and working with group process. These competencies are important in quality and quality assurance because they are very useful in consultancy, mentoring and coaching processes. They are the major tenets and building blocks of OD and QA that can yield the best results once they are employed. The appropriate use of self becomes a game changer in the development and transformation of individual employee and the organizations/companies/government agencies, etc, in general (Dr. Makuku to fill in – about 50 words only)

In quality assurance, Dr. Makuku is extensively and intensively involved in 1) The Practice of Coordination and Facilitation of capacity building activities, 2) Virtual OD Facilitation, 3) Organization Design, 4) Institutional Assessment and Evaluation for Self-improvement 5) Research Methods, Academic and Grant Writing Skills and 6) Group Process Consultation and Transformation through handholding. The wide range of knowledge, skills and experience that Dr Makuku has in OD and QA make her one of best people needed to push forward quality assurance and OD education, awareness, adoption and implementation in civil organizations and society, companies/industries, institutions, international and non-governmental organizations.

Knowledge Sharing

Scholar-practitioners are ‘technites’ who integrate and share knowledge obtained through experience and craft. Knowledge sharing is key to quality and quality assurance. This is critical in advancing the theory and practice of quality assurance. There are multiple ways to knowledge sharing. Dr. Makuku is involved through facilitating webinars, giving keynote speeches and addresses, in-person workshops, and publications.

Foundational Concepts & Values that guide your work – Dr Violet Makuku’s work is definitely informed by the OD and QA values and principles that have been highlighted above. Aspects like efficiency, accountability, fairness, selflessness, empathy, humility and non-discrimination of others, add on to the list of the important components to consider.