Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Institute of International Education announced this week that seventeen new fellowships have been awarded as part of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellows initiative.
The program, which began in 2014 as part of an effort to reverse so-called “brain drain” from across the continent, has awarded more than 100 fellowships for U.S. and Canadian based African scholars to return to universities across six countries in Africa so that they can collaborate with local academics and build institutional relationships around research.
“Diaspora academics constitute a critical facet of higher education internationalization,” Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History at Quinnipiac University, who chairs the program's Advisory Council, told the IIE. “The connections fostered through them ultimately support capacity building and innovation in home and host countries.” As African institutions increasingly look to higher education as a resource for development, leaders from across the continent are turning to the African Diaspora to play a greater role. There are an estimated 25,000 African academics currently working in the U.S. alone, according to Zeleza, who hopes to see almost half of them deployed to Africa over the next decade.
Read the press release from the Institute of International Education here.
