Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to Support Projects at 43 Universities in Africa

CAPE COAST, May, 2018 – University of Cape Coast was selected by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) to host an African Diaspora scholar from the United States to work on a collaborative project on Curriculum Enhancement for Coastal Water Resources Studies and Research Collaboration in Coastal Environmental Processes at the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana. Dr Simon Mariwah will work with Prof. Joseph T. Zume, a Fellow from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, Shippensburg, USA.

This project seeks to provide students, both undergraduate and graduate, with opportunities to carry out monitoring of several coastal water resources and environmental parameters. Students’ learning will improve significantly as they become engaged in the process of hands-on data collection, analyses, and interpretation. Likewise, the data generated through the project, over time, will facilitate lecturer research engagements. The need to step up monitoring of water resources, not just around coastal environments, but across Ghana cannot be overemphasised. For example, in coastal communities like Cape Coast, where some residents depend on private groundwater wells, it is necessary to monitor groundwater against saltwater intrusion from the ocean. This is one of the projected impacts of climate change on coastal locations.

The University of Cape Coast project is part of a broader initiative that will pair 55 CADFP scholars with one of 43 higher education institutions and collaborators in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda to work together on curriculum co-development, research, graduate teaching, training, and mentoring activities in the coming months.  The visiting Fellows will work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include controlling malaria, strengthening peace and conflict studies, developing a new master’s degree in emergency medicine, training and mentoring graduate students in criminal justice, archiving African indigenous knowledge, creating low-cost water treatment technologies, building capacity in microbiology and pathogen genomics, and developing a forensic accounting curriculum. To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several CADFP alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its fifth year, is designed to increase Africa’s brain circulation, build capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. It is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council. A total of 335 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013.

Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars (individually or in small groups) and cover the expenses for project visits of between 21 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance .

See full list of 2018 projects, hosts and scholars and their universities.

Please direct all questions related to the application process to AfricanDiaspora@iie.org.