Quality assurance encompasses any activity that is concerned with assessing and improving the merit or the worth of a development intervention or its compliance with given standards.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2002. Glossary of key terms in evaluation and results based management. Paris: OECD.
One of the main tasks of a quality assurance agency is precisely to determine its understanding of what quality is and how to define it, the stakeholders it will consult, the way in which it will take into account international standards and definitions, and how to legitimize and make this definition acceptable throughout the system (Martin and Stella, 2007: 33).
Martin, M.; Stella, A. 2007. External quality assurance in higher education: making choices. Paris: IIEP-UNESCO.