Published: September 17, 2005
U.S. Foundations Re-Launch Partnership for Higher Education in Africa
Six foundations announce a $200 million commitment in seven African nations
New York – Six U.S. foundations announced a $200 million commitment over the next five years to strengthen higher education in seven African nations that will affect more than 300,000 university and college students.
"This is an outstanding display of global citizenship. We need to train teachers and build up research capacity; we need to strengthen open universities and distance learning programs; and we need to ensure that African institutions have access to the latest technologies, including improved online access to databases, libraries and journals," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said September 16 at the Ford Foundation.
The announcement was held on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly 60th anniversary summit.
The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa was launched by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Ford, McArthur and Rockefeller Foundations in 2000. In those five years the foundations contributed more than $150 million to build core capacity and support special initiatives at universities in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda, according to the Ford Foundation.
Kenya joined the partnership this year, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation also joined the partnership this year.
The new investment by the foundations includes more than $5 million that will enable a consortium of African universities to obtain eight times the amount of Internet bandwidth than was available to them as recently as two years ago. Intelsat, a satellite operator, is providing the additional bandwidth to the consortium.
Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, said this partnership will help Africa to "give birth to its own leaders, to give birth to its own destiny."
Annan said this renewed commitment by the six foundations coincides with the international community’s unprecedented attention to Africa.
"Women and poor people still face too many obstacles on their path to higher education," he said. "The AIDS epidemic is having a terrible impact, taking the lives of qualified instructors and researchers. And the brain drain continues to create situations in which the developing world’s leading researchers win prizes for research conducted in the West, and not at home."
Source: U.S. Department of State
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