May 4, 2000 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Hoping to catch the wave of reform now washing across Africa, four U.S. foundations have announced a joint plan to spend at least $100-million over the next five years to improve universities in six or more African countries.
“Now is the right time,” said Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. “A number of countries in Africa are undergoing economic and social reform and embracing democracy.”
The four grant makers — the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Rockefeller — must still work out details of their collaboration. But at last week’s announcement at Carnegie’s headquarters here, foundation officials said that universities in sub-Saharan African countries have unprecedented opportunities now that their countries have become more stable.
“There is good news in Africa, contrary to what you see on your TV screen,” Mr. Conway said. “Mozambique, for example, is going through terrible problems but its university is reforming.”
The foundations’ commitment sends a signal to African countries that higher education is moving to the top of the philanthropic agenda after a long period of emphasis on basic education, said Narciso Matos, the former rector of Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, who joined Carnegie’s staff in March to help coordinate the collaboration.
“There is a realization now,” Mr. Matos said, “that you need university-trained personnel to help govern.”
Three universities will receive help this year: Makerere University, in Uganda; the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania; and Eduardo Mondlane. The foundation consortium is currently sponsoring case studies to determine which institutions of higher education can best use their help. The projects will be confined to Africa’s English-speaking countries, which also include Namibia, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Although each of the foundations has a history of grant making in Africa and each has worked with another on occasion, this is the first time that all four have collaborated on such an ambitious project.
Joyce Moock, assistant vice president at Rockefeller and the foundation’s principal program officer on this project, said that “Africa has been the hardest area of the world to work in, because of the lack of institutional stability.
“We’ve been hungry for the opportunity,” Ms. Moock said. “Now it’s come to us on a plate. We’re catching a wave of vibrancy and energy.”
Joining foundation officials at last week’s announcement was Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who had challenged philanthropies to find ways for Africa to benefit from economic globalization. Mr. Annan said the initiative will work only if “the necessary resources are mobilized,” and he urged the grant makers to invite other foundations to contribute.
He and Andrew Siwela, president of the Association of African Universities, each emphasized the need for African universities to retain their faculty members. The older generation is retiring, Mr. Annan said, and “the younger generation is going into business, where they see the big bucks.”
Mr. Annan added that he hoped that the foundations’ investment would lead to “what we all want: African answers to African problems.”
