St. Paul’s University, Kenya was selected by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) to host an African Diaspora scholar from [the United States] to work with on a collaborative project aimed at Strengthening the Bachelors and Doctoral Concentrations in Peace and Conflict Studies to meet market needs and improve the employability of graduates. John Mwangi Githigaro, a Peace and Conflict Studies lecturer at St. Paul’s University will lead the project together with Dr. Nicholas Kariuki Githuku, a Fellow from City University of New York, York College, New York, USA.
The project is geared towards strengthening the Bachelors and Doctoral Concentrations in Peace and Conflict Studies to meet market needs and improve the employability of graduates. This will be achieved through the review and strengthening of Peace and Conflict Studies Curriculum, graduate student mentoring and the development of a Peace Education curriculum. This collaboration will have an increased impact on the quality of graduates churned out by the university, who shall broadly be responsive and prepared to meet market needs in an ever-changing conflict landscape. Developing a peace education curriculum will also broadly impact the community through training and collective problem solving of peace related matters. This latter point contributes to community service, a key pillar of the university.
The St. Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya 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.
Click here to view the full list of 2018 projects, hosts and scholars and their universities