Fred Boadu returns to Ghana to fill research gaps

African academics living abroad are a rich source of expertise for the continent’s universities to tap into.

In this film, we meet Fred Boadu, who left Ghana to pursue an engineering career in the United States more than 20 years ago. He is now a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University.

But Boadu has not forgotten his home country. Over the past 14 years, he has regularly returned to the University where he gained his first degree, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), to help the physics and engineering departments develop their curriculums.

Boadu helped set up the first geophysics course at the university and often returns to Ghana to teach students, with support from the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, of which he is a fellow.

Boadu talks about his diaspora work and the importance of ensuring that visiting academics have a lasting impact by supplementing rather than replicating the work of local lecturers.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program has supported 110 short-term fellowships for North American academics at higher education institutes in six African countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

This piece is part of the Africa’s Ph.D. Renaissance series funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.