African Studies Center

at Michigan State University

The African Higher Education Partnership Initiative (AHEPI)

An initiative of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University

The MSU AHEPI Committee:

Introduction

Building on several initiatives in 1998, AHEPI was initiated at MSU in summer 1999 in response to what the faculty perceived as a series of crises undermining African higher education institutions and the urgent need to use partnerships with those institutions far more strategically.

During summer 2000, Professors Mehretu and Ogundimu consulted higher institutions and organizations in Africa, initially in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Prof. Wiley attended the UNESCO-sponsored World Higher Education Conference. In 2000-02, a series of roundtables, lectures, discussions, and conversations with visiting scholars and administrators are being organized on the needs of African universities and what should be the response of foreign partners.

The major goal of AHEPI is to strengthen African universities and our partnerships with them. The world needs strong African universities, research institutes, and technical institutions to attend to the pressing indigenous problems of poverty, disease, governance, and conflict, to innovatively address issues on the continent with African and global knowledge, and to make Africa's unique contributions on the world stage to the world's pressing global issues and research literatures. Since 1998, the MSU faculty has acted on the conviction that the first agenda for scholars of Africa in the wealthier nations should be to develop serious partnerships with African scholars and institutions and to understand better how foreign partner institutions should most productively link to African tertiary education institutions (TEIs) to our mutual benefit in this decade.

In addition, the faculty continue their research on issues in African higher education, including:

Action Plans

The faculty arrived at a series of convictions about priority activities that have been tested in consultation with our African colleagues, the African Studies Association, and the international community at UNESCO.

1. Partnership Best Practices

In order to create a context for reciprocity, equity, and transparency in partnerships between U.S. and African institutions and scholars, in conversation with faculty from African higher education institutions, the faculty have developed two sets of guidelines, one individual and one institutional, as a foundation for an enlarged discussion of collaboration. In 2001, the African Studies Association, in an initiative of Prof. Richard Roberts (Stanford) and David Wiley (MSU) also developed Guidelines for Ethical Conduct in Research and Projects in Africa.

2. Research on Higher Education in Africa

The MSU faculty continue their research on African higher education, especially by graduate students and faculty in the Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education (HALE) program of the College of Education. Faculty with a focus on African higher education include:

3. African Internet Connectivity

With MATRIX:Arts,Letters, and Social Science Online, the Center has a major emphasis on training for African TEIs and cultural institutions in the African Internet Connectivity Project (http://www.matrix.msu.edu/aic/) both at MSU and in Africa. This has included Internet and web training for west and central African women's organization leaders. MSU has donated four high-speed servers to African TEIs and institutes for speeding global access to African TEIs and vice versa (currently in Dakar, Accra, and Durban) and provides content for sharing.

4. Websites to Facilitate Exchange with African Higher Education

  1. African Higher Education Website

    In order to facilitate partnerships of higher education institutions in the Northern Hemisphere and Africa, and in collaboration with the Association of African Universities, we will build a major website portal on "African Higher Education." This is a partnership effort of the Association of African Universities, African Studies Association, and the MSU African Studies Center. The website will include (a) detailed contact information on all African higher education institutions, (b) key papers on African institutions and the role of partnerships in their revitalization, (c) links to sources of funding to support partnerships of North American and African universities, (d) links to other Web-based resources on African higher education, and (e) a "partnership brokering" section in which African universities can indicate their particular interests in partnerships (research, planning, study abroad, collaborative graduate study, and so on) as well as their pressing needs for visiting instructors or researchers in specific disciplines.

  2. South African Higher Education Partnerships Website

    The Partnerships Project is a project of the Higher Education Forum of the U.S.-South Africa Binational Commission (BNC) - renamed the Bilateral Forum in 2002. The Higher Education Forum was created in 1997 to assist the Human Resource Development and Education Committee of theBinational Commission to facilitate cooperation between people engaged in higher education in the two countries and to discuss policy transformation and issues of common interest.

  3. South African Higher Education Resources Project Website

    This website provides access to a broad range of information on South African tertiary education, including (1) Contact Information for Institutions, (2) Higher Education Organizations in South Africa, (3) South African Government Documents on Higher Education, (4) Other Documents and Speeches on Higher Education Transformation, (5) U.S. Government Programs and Reports on South Africa, (6) Academic Partnerships with South Africa Conference, (7) U.S.-South Africa Higher Education Partnerships Project, (8) U.S. Study Abroad Programs in South Africa, (9) Other Information Sources on South Africa.

  4. Conference : "Academic Partnerships with South Africa for Mutual Capacity Building" (1998)

    More than 240 higher educationists came together at MSU to discuss Academic Partnerships with South Africans for Mutual Capacity Building on October 18-21, 1998. The conference explored possibilities for building partnerships that would mutually enhance the capacities of institutions in South Africa and in other countries to address the many global, regional, and local challenges that we face. The goals of the conference were to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of current academic partnerships and exchanges, to define new models of cooperation between South African institutions and those in North America and Europe, and to explore strategies for mobilizing financial resources to support and enhance academic linkages and partnerships.

  5. Proposed Conference: "Academic Partnerships with African Higher Education for Mutual Capacity Building" (2007)

    For 2003, we have proposed to organize this major conference collaboratively with the Association of African Universities and the African Studies Association. The meeting would seek to attract North American and European TEI faculty and administrators to partner with African TEIs by providing a venue where the opportunities and foci of the African institutions could be explained by their representatives and issues of collaboration and partnership explored.

5. New University Partnerships

  1. Eastern Seaboard Association of Tertiary Institutions in KwaZulu/Natal (South Africa) partnering with the Universities of Natal, Durban-Westville, and Zululand and the Natal, MLSultan, and Mangosuthu Technikons for building a model project of Internet outreach to surrounding disadvantaged communities. The project is focused on the community-identified needs of health incl. HIV/AIDS; microenterprise and job development; food and food security; women's rights and gender affairs; youth affairs; community organization, empowerment, and mobilization; education and training opportunities. In addition, communities are being assisted to design their own websites to share their assets, skills, and resources as well as to tell their history to others.
  2. Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL) - with University of Rwanda
  3. Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar - A. new multilevel, multi-faculty partnership initiative.

6. African e-Journals Project

Because only a small portion of African research scholarship is known across Africa - much less in the USA and the rest of the world, the faculty concluded that priority should be given to projects that actively disseminate African journals and other research publications in an economically-sustainable way. With U.S. Department of Education support, MSU has launched the African e-Journals Project to publish electronically African academic journals collaboratively with African publishers and associations, to sell them to Northern Hemisphere libraries, to return a profit to the African publishers, and to provide all African users with gratis access to the journals.

7. Building Study Abroad with Reciprocity, Equity, and Transparency of Exchange and Finances

  1. Equity of Finances - Believing that foreign partners from the wealthier nations should use their programs and resources to increment the training and program-building opportunities of the African TEIs, we have initiated a call for greater parity in educational exchange between African and U.S. institutions. On a pilot basis, MSU has initiated an asymmetrical linkage program with University of Durban-Westville and the University of Zimbabwe to implement this plan as a model of collaboration and equitable sharing of resources. For example, they can use the tuition and fees they charge their students for studying at African universities to build funds which can be used by faculty and post-graduate students from African TEIs to travel abroad.
  2. High Standards of Reciprocity - Believing that foreign TEIs should collaborate with their compatriots to build consortial linkages that can eliminate redundancy, reduce high administrative costs, and expand the knowledge-base available in the linkage, MSU has initiated the National Consortium for Study in Africa. With 17 other U.S. major African studies centers, MSU has formed the NCSA to develop cooperative planning and implementing a series of standards and best practices in the exchange of students that builds reciprocity, collaboration, equity, and exchanges.

8. New Proposal: Support for African Participation in U.S. Professional Associations

African professionals have little access to the vigorous exchange of U.S. professional associations. In a globalizing world, those associations are intellectually poorer for the absence of African colleagues. The disciplinary professional associations of the wealthier nations should be encouraged to more actively incorporate African scholars in their annual meetings and publications and should provide a major portion of the resources to make that possible. To achieve those goals, the Center is seeking to organize a consultation in Washington with the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the African Studies Association as well as a number of disciplinary associations on "Engaging Foreign Scholars in U.S. Academic Association in a Globalizing World," seeking them to sponsor young African scholars at their annual meetings and to offer their electronic journals gratis to Africa.

A call to other Western higher education institutions

We call on other higher education communities in the West to join us in these efforts and other innovative efforts to build greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the African needs and to build the kinds of global cooperation needed to deal with the looming global problems of poverty, unemployment, energy, environment, health, population, and well-being. In a globalizing world, such pressing issues require the combined efforts of the higher education institutions in both the wealthier and poorer nations. We intend for the MSU African Higher Education Partnership Initiative to be one voice in that consultation, dialogue, and planning for collaborative action.