A Letter from the President

In reading the article on the National Library of South Africa in this issue of the Carnegie Reporter, I found myself intrigued, on many levels, by the story of the Timbuktu Manuscripts. These thousands of documents--a wealth of scholarship dating back more than seven hundred years and currently housed in various archives and libraries in the city of Timbuktu in the African nation of Mali--speak to us across the centuries with unmistakable eloquence and import. They are a touchstone for many issues with perhaps surprising relevance to current-day events--even those that involve this foundation and the people and organizations, including other foundations, with which we work.

To begin with, it's important to note that since 1925, Africa has been the major geographic focus of the efforts of Carnegie Corporation of New York to work with developing countries as they identify and then implement the policies and strategies that will advance the quality of life available to their citizens and to make the nations themselves full partners in the global marketplace of ideas, as well as economic opportunities. In recent years, the Corporation has focused its support on three areas: Strengthening African Universities, Enhancing Women's Opportunities in Higher Education and Revitalizing Selected African Libraries. In these efforts, we have often partnered with the Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations, which along with Carnegie Corporation, comprise the Partnership to Strengthen Higher Education in Africa. (It should also be noted that a number of Scandinavian countries have been long-time supporters of advancing higher education in Africa.)

On September 16, joined by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the presidents of three African nations--John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana, Armando Guebuza of Mozambique and Mwai Kibaki of Kenya--Susan Berresford, President of the Ford Foundation, hosted an event at Ford that signaled the recommitment of the Partnership to its support of African higher education. Over the past five years, the foundations have invested more than $150 million in higher education in six sub-Saharan African nations--Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, with Kenya recently joining the effort. Jonathan Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation and myself were also present, as were representatives of several of the African universities that are our partners in this work along with other dignitaries and education leaders from the U.S. and Africa. We celebrated the success that has been achieved and looked toward the future as African universities, using programs and strategies designed by African educators for African students, go forward in preparing the next generation of African leaders. At the Ford Foundation gathering, two new members were also formally welcomed into the Partnership: the William and Flora Hewlett and Andrew W. Mellon foundations. Together, the six foundations have pledged to invest an additional $200 million over the next five years to continue our support for African higher education.

Working with institutional partners has not always been easy. Foundations, like universities and corporations, have their own culture, their own ways of doing things and their own goals and measures of success. The four original foundation partners don't necessarily concentrate their efforts in the same countries and may sometimes be working on very different projects with a range of different institutions that don't always meet each other's criteria for serving a particular foundation's mission or fit with the vision of its program staff who work closely with their African colleagues. And yet, because we all agreed on one thing--that education is the key to human development in every realm that contributes to the advancement of civilization, including social, political and intellectual progress--we were able to find common ground and to contribute to each other's efforts while continuing the individual work that was important to achieving each foundation's underlying goals and fulfilling its mission. Which brings me back to the Timbuktu manuscripts because, like the renaissance taking place in African higher education, these documents are part of the story of Africa that is unknown to so many--the rich history, the commitment to not only oral traditions but also the written word, the respect for scholarship and the understanding of the importance of libraries and archives to serve as the generational engines that carry knowledge across the decades and across borders. Carnegie Corporation and its foundation partners take deep pride in being able to participate in many different aspects of African development, from the preservation of its history to its leap across the digital divide. Examples of the range of work being supported include the scholarship of Beverly Mack, recipient of a 2000 Carnegie Corporation of New York Scholars award, who has been exploring pre-eighteenth century Muslim women's scholarship and social activism in West and North Africa. (Mack, incidentally, mentions the Timbuktu manuscripts in an article for The Maghreb Review1, noting, "As contemporary researchers in Timbuktu seek to preserve manuscripts that date back to the 13th century, they find a small portion of works by women, often in scholarly families...") On the other end of the spectrum, there is the Partnership support for the creation and development of a bandwidth consortium consisting of eleven universities in five African countries as well as the Association of African Universities that will allow consortium participants to purchase online Internet connectivity in bulk, and thus lower the price. (For a variety of reasons, including a lack of infrastructure and a reliance on satellites, African universities can pay more than 100 times the bandwidth price available to their counterparts in Europe and North America.) Increased and more reliable online access is critical to allowing universities across Africa to achieve many advances, including being integrated into the global academic community, doing research, publishing their own findings and helping students connect to their contemporaries in other countries.

And perhaps some of these teachers, students and their universities will participate in another of the great "unknown" projects already underway in Africa: the digitization of the Timbuktu Manuscripts, so that this wealth of information that, in the words of a 2003 Ford Foundation report, "may compel scholars to rewrite the history of Islam and of Africa," can be shared, via the Internet, with the rest of the world. Thus will the record of humanity be enriched--and what greater goal could any of us wish to have even a small part in working toward?

Vartan Gregorian
President

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