For over a decade, the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program has funded more than 600 collaborations between diaspora fellows and 192 African host institutions
In 1995, a World Bank report found that around 23,000 qualified academic staff were leaving Africa each year, in a brain drain that has contributed to severe shortages of faculty and resources at African universities. Today, despite accounting for 18 percent of the global population, Africa produces only 1–2 percent of the world’s research output.
In response, many diasporic African scholars have sought to contribute “intellectual remittances” to Africa-based academics and universities, offering their time and skills to contribute to developing courses, supervising students, and collaborating on research. However, they have faced challenges in maintaining these relationships due to a lack of financial and structural support.
Those scholars include Mojúbàolú Okome, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, who worked hard to stay connected with African academics after moving to the United States from Nigeria. “It was actually quite exhausting, doing all of that with my own resources,” she says.
Then Okome was selected for the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, launched in 2013 by Carnegie Corporation of New York through a grant to the Institute of International Education. In just over a decade, the program has paired more than 600 fellowships with 192 African host institutions, and Carnegie has provided over $15 million in funding to the IIE in support of the fellowship program.
Each collaboration kicks off with a request from an African host institution, ensuring local priorities set the agenda. Okome responded to a request from Nigeria’s University of Ibadan to develop an interdisciplinary political science curriculum. Another fellow, Bowling Green State University professor Kefa Otiso, was asked to help develop a geography curriculum at Kenya’s Kisii University.
The partnerships blossomed. By her fellowship’s end, Okome inked a memorandum of understanding between the University of Ibadan and her home university in New York to continue academic exchanges. Otiso secured an agreement between Kisii University and his home institution to perform research on water sanitation issues, comparing Ohio’s Lake Erie and Kenya’s Lake Victoria.
“The [partnership] would have never happened without the Carnegie fellowship,” says Otiso. “The reason it was successful is that people like me tend to be the bridge between African and U.S. institutions.”
The diaspora fellows say the partnerships have been win-win. Otiso says working with local scholars was “very beneficial” for his intellectual growth. “You gain a lot from this cross fertilization of ideas,” he says.
Okome agrees. “Nobody's as steeped in the issues as these people are. For me, it is just a joy to be there and to be with people who understand not just the theory but are deeply invested.”
Learn more about the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program and apply here.
Hiba Said is the program assistant for the Higher Education and Research in Africa program.
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