GERMANY-AFRICA: Partnership boosts African universities

The German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD, is running a major partnership programme that supports the training of academics at top-level African universities where graduates assume executive roles in areas key to development. One of five specialist centres, the Tanzanian-German Centre for Law, opened last year, another in the Congo has just been launched and three others are being set up in Ghana, Namibia and South Africa.

The projects focus on cross-cutting topics such as good governance, administration, team formation and conflict management.

"Far from wanting to encourage any brain drain from Africa, our aim is to support a genuine input locally that will help build structures and affect people living in the respective African regions," said Dr Dorothee Weyler, head of the DAAD's Special Africa Project. "Take the Tanzanian-German Centre for Law in Dar Es Salaam, for example. As quality is established in Tanzania, it can be spread throughout East Africa."

The Tanzanian scheme is being run in collaboration with the University of Bayreuth in Southern Germany. The Congolese-German Centre for Microfinance partners the Université Protestante au Congo in Kinshasa with the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

The three other schemes being prepared are the Ghanaian-German Centre for Development and Medical Research (University of Ghana, Centre for Development Research in Bonn and University Clinic of Heidelberg), the Namibian-German Centre for Logistics (Polytechnic of Namibia and University of Bayreuth) and the South African-German Centre for Development Research and Criminal Law (Universities of the Western Cape and Bochum).

Each of the African Centres is to receive up to EUR500,000 (US$664,000) a year over a five-year period, to be spent on training and upgrading lecturers as well as improving infrastructure and developing modern courses. The programme is explicitly not part of Germany's development cooperation effort and it is the Foreign Office, not the Ministry for Development and Economic Cooperation, that is providing funding.

Graduates from the centres will hold masters and PhD degrees in their respective subjects. Higher education management is incorporated in all the projects as a special pillar.

With only a short time to establish the programme, DAAD surveyed already-existing collaborative programmes between German and African institutions (more than 70 in all) to find the right candidates. Weyler stressed that making the right choice was difficult given the good quality of existing schemes.

One crucial factor on the African side was society's actual need for graduates in the respective subject areas within the regions in Africa of partner universities. The spin-off for the German institutions taking part in the programme is that it is certain to give a strong boost to their internationalisation efforts.

The Tanzanian-German Centre for Law, or TGCL, is now open to interested candidates from the member states of the East African Community: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The first intake, last September, comprised 10 students for the LLM programme. For the second intake, 10 LLM and five PhD students have been recruited.

"We are in good cooperation with the judiciary and other legal institutions and sectors both within Tanzania and elsewhere in the region," says Kennedy Gastorn, project coordinator at the University of Dar Es Salaam's Faculty of Law.

"In Tanzania, we are working together with several government institutions including the Law Reform Commission, the Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance and the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau. Non-state actors include the Tanganyika Law Society and NGOs such as the National Organisation for Legal Aid." The TGCL cooperates at East African Community level, too, with the East Africa Court of Justice.

Cooperation ensures a useful theory-practice link. Students are drawn from partner institutions, while practitioners from these institutions deliver special courses, talk to students and work as outside lecturers. Furthermore, several events have been jointly organised, including conferences on the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and on the Killing of Albinos.

Gastorn believes partnerships such as Bayreuth-Dar Es Salaam can make an important contribution to achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. "In our programme, you have a developed nation supporting a developing one in forming student skills and expertise for them to qualify as future leaders in national, regional and international arenas," he said.

"And then there is the aspect of the TGCL focusing on the areas of human rights law, constitutional law and comparative law. These areas are taught with a view to regional integration projects in particular.

"Thus the TGCL fits in well with world leaders adopting the MDGs as a promise to achieve peace, security, development and fundamental freedoms, for without enough knowledge of constitutional and human rights, many freedoms that could be secured will be denied. Furthermore, in dealing with the East African region as a whole, it impacts beyond national frontiers, acting as a recipe for global partnership."

Gastorn sees TGCL practice itself as a realisation of MDG objectives. "Gender equality and empowerment of women are at the heart of the project," he said. "And students are admitted on a 50% male and 50% female basis."

michael.gardner@uw-news.com