Estonia-headquartered DreamApply has partnered with two higher education institutions in Africa to assist with their internationalisation strategies.
The company’s student application management solution will be rolled out at Nigeria’s Covenant University and Ashesi University in Ghana.
“They have very ambitious internationalisation plans”
The DreamApply SaaS solutions will help the institutions digitalise, automate and customise their student recruitment and admissions processes, the company said.
“We aim to maximise their efficiency in admissions, so they could reallocate their time and resources into something much more important: Putting Africa on the map of the higher education sector as a study destination,” DreamApply CEO Sten Rinne said.
The application specialist acknowledged that the continent is often considered as a source market for international students, he continued.
“We started to ask questions to ourselves about African universities, student mobility and internationalisation in Africa and student recruitment trends,” he explained.
Covenant University, one of Nigeria’s most prestigious universities, started to use DreamApply for its international admissions in July 2020 before rolling out the service for domestic admissions in October 2020, DreamApply noted.
“They have very ambitious internationalisation plans,” Rinne added.
“As a company whose approach is to grow with our partners, this seems like our kind of challenge.”
Director of the International Office and Linkages at Covenant University, Ada Sonia Peter explained that the deployment of DreamApply would make it easier for international students to subscribe to its programs.
Covenant has seen a lot of traffic from Africans and Africans in Diaspora, especially from the UK and from the US, she continued.
“Our target is Africa, but then we’ve also seen persons in Diaspora who would want their children to have a feel of the continent in a safe place and still get good education,” Peter noted.
“The mission of the university is to restore the dignity of the black race,” she told The PIE News, which is the institution’s key mission.
“And of course, we’re also committed to raising a new generation of leaders and, of course, graduating students with relevant industry skill sets. So we imagine that our international students who are keen about at least two out of these three factors will be able to feed into the training at Covenant.”
Along with Nigeria and Ghana, DreamApply sees a very similar potential and ambition in other universities from South Africa and Kenya, Rinne concluded.