that we did recently, which was building a website for the ACQF. So let's start at the very beginning. What is the ACQF? Thanks for that intro, Talia. For those who don't know Juzy, I'm Karel. I'm a front-end developer and designer, and I was the project lead from Juzy's side on

the ACQF project. To answer your question though, ACQF, which stands for the African Continental Qualifications Framework, is the largest qualifications framework, or RQF, to date. With its goal to coordinate 55 African countries and eight regional communities, it is also

the only RQF that interacts on two different levels, national and regional qualification frameworks. Tricky business for anybody trying to coordinate that kind of data. A qualifications framework is a formal structure for qualifications and learning levels so

that they can be comparable, transparent, and held to a certain level of quality. Okay, so for example, the qualification someone gets when they graduate high school is regulated by a qualifications framework so that employers and tertiary education institutions can understand

the graduate's level of education and then compare it to that of other high school graduates from other countries and regions. So in other words, without a qualifications framework, nobody would know what any qualifications mean and it would be very difficult to get a job or to continue education outside of

whatever institution gave you the original qualification. So every time you would go to a new institution or a new place of work, they would have to test you again so that you can prove your skills because whatever qualifications you

get outside of that institution would be essentially meaningless. Is that right? That is exactly it. Yeah, so pretty important stuff. And what were the goals and the requirements for this project? The main tasks of the website were to promote the development of the HQA framework, give

them a secure home for all the materials they've been gathering, and they were a lot, and provide a structure for stakeholders and contributors to see and understand the resulting framework as it evolves. The initial development happened between 2019 and 2022.

So this is technically a pandemic baby, but websites are living creatures. So it is ongoing until the framework is complete. While we were developing the website, they were developing outputs, including policies, guidelines, feasibility analyses, learning programs, and research on existing African

qualification systems. A lot of this content is still changing. The website did have some serious objectives. It had to contribute to comparability, quality, and transparency of qualifications, facilitate recognition of diplomas and certificates, support the creation of an African education

and qualification space, and it had to promote cooperation between existing and evolving qualification frameworks in Africa and worldwide. Sure, so with all of that research being done and all those materials being developed for the framework, it sounds like there are a lot of people involved with the ACQF, a lot

of people and a lot of organizations. Who were the main stakeholders for the project? The main stakeholders in the initial development were the European Training Foundation, GIZ,

and the African Union. Since we mostly work with local clients from South Africa, it was very exciting for us to work with an international client, especially at this scale. Yeah, speaking of scale, what was the development process of such a big project like?

The scale of it was incredibly exciting. It was a big project, so we approached it through a series of sprints with specific goals that we set. We worked very closely with the project coordinator, setting goals, testing functionality, assessing progress. She had been with the project since its inception, so her wealth of knowledge was incredible

to see. She's wonderful to work with and helped keep the project on track and moving swiftly. It was always great to have such a team player as a client. It always leads to better outcomes. Initial development included layers of development running concurrently, all built on the Plone

platform. We designed and developed the front end, including some standard Plone functionality, privacy settings, content layering, standard content types, et cetera, but systematically added the custom functionality as it was finalized, tested, and populated with data.

Yeah, so what kind of custom functionality did JuZee work build for this website? We built a very nifty inventory tool to start tracking the framework as it was being assembled. This tool essentially adds specifications per level, which allows a country to correlate

their own levels in similar terms and specifications, all in the interest of moving toward levels that align for an easier way of comparing different qualifications across borders. Okay, yeah, so a specific tool that would help them with the comparing of the different

qualifications. Yeah, so what was the outcome of the project? Well, we ended up building a secure, intuitive, and user-friendly platform, which is helping

the ACQF update key details of their developing qualifications framework, as well as lay the groundwork for framework that compares different African countries qualifications framework, not only to each other, but to other qualification frameworks around the world.

With the help of JuZee, the ACQF website supports comparability, quality, and transparency of qualifications and support people's lifelong learning. And with the global village becoming smaller and smaller every day, this is becoming increasingly important. Yeah, that's definitely true.

Fewer and fewer people stay in one place their whole lives, and having a qualifications framework like this really makes people so much freer to move around between organizations and countries and regions. And when you look at the demographics in Africa, we really do have a lot of young people on

this continent, and giving them that freedom to move around and to seek the best opportunities for them is so important for the growth of this continent and its people. Yeah, so finally, was the client happy with the outcome and with Plone?

The feedback from the project coordinator, eventually echoed by other stakeholders and contributors was that the website not only delivered, but even surpassed their expectations. We listened to what was needed, and we helped grow their vision into something that does

the job very well. The project is still growing and evolving with more data from 55 countries and eight regions being added. And as more data comes in, more needs come to light, and more stakeholders get involved, Juzi will just continue to grow and evolve the website.

That's awesome to hear. It's always satisfying to see Plone live up to its reputation as a really elegant and mighty system that can really scale and grow as a project evolves, truly a system that can be with you from the very beginning and then grow as big as you need it to.

Yeah, so thank you everyone for joining us as we chat about this project. It was an honor to be part of something like this, and we really look forward to continuing to work with the ACQF. Please visit acqf.africa to learn more about their work and this framework. And of course, click through their website that we built for them.

Thank you.