Carnegie Corporation interacts with beneficiaries of UG ‘Next Generation of Academics in Africa Project’

Vice President of International Program at Carnegie Corporation, Deana Arsenian has disclosed that the University of Ghana is the only educational institution benefiting from the corporation’s Development and Post-Graduate Training Interventions, ‘Next Generation of Academics in Africa Project’.

She explained that Carnegie has helped networks of Ghanaian students in terms of funding for their Post-graduate training, Post-doctorate and MPHIL researches apart from its project at the UG.

According to Deana Arsenian, over 1500 fellowships in Africa have enjoyed some form of funding from the Carnegie Corporation in the past 10 years.

“In Africa, for all our programmes over the last 10years, we did a research and our analysis showed that we’ve funded over 1500 fellowships in the higher education sector,” she revealed in an interview after a meeting with beneficiaries of the Carnegie Project at the University of Ghana.

She also explained that Carnegie’s strategy has evolved in the past three years as the corporation has shifted its focus on funding post-doctoral opportunities.

“The idea was that we’ve invested through fellowship in a number of individuals in various countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to pursue their PHDs. What we want to do is to give them opportunities to learn and advance their careers by focusing on their post-doctoral research to give them a bit of time to complete their manuscripts or research project,” Ms Arsenian noted.

She also stressed the need for the development of skills and the significance of science education and stated Carnegie’s resolve in helping Ghana and other African countries produce skills based graduates through its projects.

UG Faculty has received nearly $10 million grants from Carnegie Corporation – Director

The Director of the University of Ghana Carnegie Project, Yaa Ntiamoa Baidu in an interview revealed that the faculty has received nearly $10 million from Carnegie Corporation to fund researches of beneficiaries.

Since the establishment of the faculty in 2010 she said, about 80 Phd and 86 MPHIL candidates have benefited from the first phase of the programme and under the phase two 45 Phd candidates and several early career faculty members are being supported on Post-doc fellowships.

She mentioned how the intervention programme is developing Ghana’s human resources through knowledge and skills training of post-graduate students at the premiere university.

“The programme is geared towards faculty development… The whole idea is to encourage our faculty to do more research, to be more productive and to have the expertise. If we have people with the expertise, who are seasoned researchers, they’re able to tackle national issues, research national issues, feed back the findings into the national development agenda and promote the country as a whole,” the Project Director reiterated.

On direct impact, Yaa Ntiamoa Baidu stressed that the Carnegie Intervention is critical as it will encourage more graduates to pursue PHD and Post-Doc training to occupy new faculties that may be created to accommodate new students from the Senior High Schools.

She said, “With the new Free SHS, it means we’re going to have a lot more people coming into the university which means we need a lot more faculties so the need to train more PHD holders become really critical for the SHS programme to succeed.”

About UG-Carnegie Next Generation of Academics in Africa Project

The University of Ghana received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2010 to implement the project “Next Generation of Academics in Africa: Enhancing the University of Ghana’s Capacity to Deliver Post-graduate Research and Training.”

The project is a part of Carnegie’s long-term support programme for tertiary education in Africa which seeks to advance excellence in postgraduate research and faculty retention.

The aim of the project is to enhance the University of Ghana’s capacity in research and post-graduate training in Ghana with the long term goals of meeting national development needs by producing young, high caliber academics who will then generate, safeguard and transmit knowledge.

Strategies:

• Support high performing students to acquire or complete their PhD training with a focus on 3 disciplines: Computational Science, Biosphere Science and Sociology.

• Institutionalize a mentorship programme for PhD students and young lecturers.

• Draw on existing partnerships with other universities in Africa, the United States of America, The United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

• Take advantage of Diaspora faculty exchange linkages and partnerships.

Outcomes:

• Increased numbers of University of Ghana faculty with PhD degrees

• Increased ability of young faculty to carry out cutting-edge research and supervise post-graduate student research

• Increased research output by University of Ghana faculty

• Enhanced post-graduate programme delivery in the selected disciplines and increased retention of next generation faculty members.