**8. Implications for quality assurance policy and practice in higher education**

There is the need for higher education institutions to be strategic in the framing of their qual‐ ity assurance policies and the practice of same and ensuring that equity is applied to key operational areas of their mandates. This will enable them to balance the foci of their quality assurance frameworks to achieve enhanced quality and also to make their quality assurance frameworks resilient to the changing dynamics of contemporary higher education. In doing so, the conceptual framework of this study offers higher education institutions a more com‐ prehensive frame to classify their operational activities and weigh them on the scale of quality assurance to ensure a strategic balance needed for enhanced quality.
