Harmonization of academic policies of public universities in Ethiopia has been made in 2013 under guidance of Higher Education Strategic Center to facilitate smooth transfer of staff and students, to enhance the quality of education at all Higher Education Institutions, to maintain uniformity in academic and technical support as well as human resource management, to produce graduates with more similar standards, and to create equal chance and similar opportunities for the graduates to pursue further studies.
The harmonized document was produced by the Academic Vice President of four public universities: Jimma University, Hawassa University, Bahir Dar University, and Wollega University following the general framework forwarded by HESC. The contents of the harmonized document include policies pertaining to academic rules and regulations, academic and technical staff development and program development and review where this part of the legislation presents policy on academic and technical staff development. Under the harmonized legislation, each university has given freedom to accommodate its unique features into their own legislation. Accordingly, Jimma University further contextualized the legislation accommodating its unique features and endorsed the legislation by its Senate in 2015.
The first harmonized Senate Legislation has now served over three years. In the due process, the Senate noticed the need of improving the legislation in order to have up-to-date, detail criteria and procedures that can govern promotion of the staff. As a result, the Senate established a taskforce, to which it gave the task of coming up with up-to-date, clear and detail rules, procedures and indicators for assessing and granting promotion requests. Accordingly, the established taskforce came up with proposal that contains up-to-date, clear and detail rules, procedures and indicators for assessing and awarding points for evidences submitted against effective teaching, publications, institutional affairs and community services. Now, Jimma University Senate has endorsed the revised legislation in its meeting held on 23/02/2018.