This three and a half year ESRC-DFID funded project (RES-167-25-0078) ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard’ is a new evidence base contributing to making higher education more socially inclusive in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wphegt). It is a mixed methods study of one public and one private case study university in each country, combining: 200 student life history interviews, comprising interviews with 119 students from public universities and 81 from private universities, registered on different programmes and with a diversity of backgrounds including under-represented groups such as women, mature, low socio-economic status and disabled students. Students were asked about their experiences of primary, secondary and higher education, with questions about their motivations, transitions, support, decision-making and first impressions of higher education, its impact on them and their future plans. 200 key staff and policymakers interviews, comprising 172 semi-structured interviews with senior academics, lecturers and staff working closely with students in the four case study institutions and 28 interviews with policymakers. Academic staff and policymakers were asked about policies, interventions, strategies and challenges for widening participation, and the part that their universities had played in working towards the Millennium Development Goals. 100 Equity Scorecards compiled largely from raw data on admission/access, retention, completion and achievement, for four programmes of study in relation to three structures of inequality: gender, socio-economic status (SES) and age. The research questions included: investigating which social groups are currently and traditionally under-represented as students in the case study institutions and whether these correlate with wider national and international patterns of social exclusion; how the case study institutions are interpreting and responding to the Millennium Development Goals; and if there is a relationship between learners’ prior experiences of education, their socioeconomic backgrounds and their experiences and achievement in education. Questions have also been posed about what mechanisms for support have been put in place for ‘nontraditional’ students to facilitate retention and achievement and how ‘non-traditional’ students might experience these interventions (see Appendix 1). Diverse stakeholders have been asked about their perceptions of the main barriers to participation for under-represented groups and what strategies the case study institutions can develop to improve the recruitment, retention and achievement of students from non-traditional backgrounds. Via the field work and its analysis, the project has produced statistical data on patterns of participation, retention and achievement and has aimed to build theory about socio-cultural aspects of higher education in Ghana and Tanzania.