External Programme Review, Accreditation, and Evidence-Traceable Regulatory Judgement: Standards, Evidence, Professional Reasoning, and Defensible Accreditation Decisions

External programme review protects the credibility of qualifications only when evaluators can explain how an applicable standard, a specific institutional claim, trustworthy evidence and defensible professional reasoning warrant a particular conclusion and regulatory response. Accreditation can otherwise reward documentary completeness, confuse uncertainty with failure, or conceal inconsistent treatment beneath numerical scores. This chapter develops an analytically rigorous and professionally operational account of external quality assurance with Rwanda as the principal regulatory context and selected African systems as bounded comparators. A purposive critical synthesis of official instruments, continental quality-assurance standards, assessment and argumentation scholarship, and the author's prior doctoral framework differentiates institutional authority, programme-level readiness, actual educational effectiveness and decision-making competence. It examines regulatory provenance, accreditation dossiers, evidence reliability, peer-review integrity, curriculum and resource appraisal, digital and AI-enabled provision, findings classification, procedural fairness and post-accreditation verification. Its principal contribution is a fully specified application of the Evidence-Traceable Accreditation Judgement (ETAJ) model within Integrated Evidence-Traceable Quality Governance (IETQG). An original toolkit comprising an authority register, evidence register, evaluator worksheet, claim-evidence-warrant matrix, findings guide, calibration exercise, model report and condition-closure record translates the model into auditable practice. Four constructed review scenarios illustrate contradictory curriculum documents, untested learning systems, staffing fragility and invalid assessment claims. ETAJ is a reason-giving architecture, not a substitute for binding HEC requirements or an independently validated decision instrument. Credible external assurance demands both evidence capable of sustaining a finding and lawful, proportionate decisions capable of withstanding informed challenge.