Ford Plans to Expand Global Fellows Program

Idemudia Lawrence is a busy man.

Last week he helped hearing-impaired athletes compete in Nigeria’s National Sports Festival while spending his free time revising his plan to curtail begging by deaf people in the streets of Abuja, the African nation’s capital.

Mr. Lawrence, chairman of the Abuja Association of the Deaf, says his dedication to assisting others was fostered in part by the Ford Foundation, which in 2003 awarded him one of its prestigious international fellowships to study at Gallaudet University, in Washington.

“I learned through the fellowship that I have a responsibility to use my knowledge for the development of my country,” he said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. The master’s degree he earned in counseling deaf children has been of “immense help to me in tackling the affairs of the deaf in Abuja and in the advocacy for favorable treatment of deaf folks like me.”

Mr. Lawrence is one of more than 2,000 candidates who in the past five years have benefited from what is the Ford Foundation’s largest grant to date: $280-million to establish the International Fellowships Program. And the New York grant maker is expected to renew its financial support for the program this month with an additional grant of as much as $75-million, according to some estimates.

The program provides scholarships to charity workers, scholars, journalists, and other local leaders from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia to pursue graduate education for up to three years at universities anywhere in the world. The fellows’ studies must be related to the foundation’s mission, which includes such broad goals as fighting poverty and advancing “human achievement.”

While Ford has supported foreign, as well as domestic, university and college students for decades, Susan V. Berresford, Ford’s president, says the International Fellowship Program stands out because it trains individuals as leaders and chooses people who traditionally do not have access to graduate-level education.

At the end of 2014, when the program is scheduled to end, “we will have a network of very talented, committed, visionary, leadership-experienced people around the world,” she says.

‘Brain Drain’

One of the fellowship’s goals is to fight the global problem of “brain drain,” in which the brightest minds from poor countries leave their homes for the United States, Canada, or Europe. According to a World Bank study released last year, 25 percent to nearly 50 percent of college-educated citizens from El Salvador, Kenya, and other impoverished countries live in wealthier parts of the world.

Ford’s program, on a small scale at least, prevents this hemorrhaging of educated people, says Joan Dassin, the program’s executive director, who formerly managed Ford’s office in Brazil. Ms. Dassin says the program specifically seeks applicants who have strong ties to their homes, and therefore are likely to return once they graduate.

“We’re selecting them on the basis of their connectedness to their communities, and that is strong incentive for them to return,” she says. “Our fellows have a moral obligation to go back to their home countries.”

So far, of the 500 people who have completed their fellowships, 75 percent reside in their homelands, says Ms. Dassin, a percentage she says shows the program’s approach is working.

But Calgar Ozden, an economist at the World Bank who has studied brain drain, says the 25 percent of Ford alumni who have remained abroad is still too high. He says the foundation should require fellowship winners to sign a contract that would force them to return home. “If a foundation is saying, Our goal is to train these people so they go back home to help their own people — that’s a very noble goal. But you have to have the right incentive structure in place,” he says.

Ms. Dassin defends the program’s approach, saying she wants to create an “ethos of return” rather than punish people. She expects that the 25 percent, most of whom are earning a doctoral degree, will return home eventually. “They’re still in transition,” she says.

For some alumni, the idea of staying away from home was never an option.

“The issues that I want to talk about are in my country,” says Maria de Fátima Mohana, a Ford fellow from Peru who returned to Lima after studying filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts, in New York. Currently Ms. Mohana is organizing a photo exhibit to chronicle the political and social changes the Andean country has experienced in the last six years. “I believe my life is here,” she says.

Expanding Opportunities

Ms. Dassin says choosing Ms. Mohana and people like her requires the program to look beyond the “educated elite,” who traditionally benefit from university, foundation, and government scholarships.

“It had to be a program of opportunity directed to people from disadvantaged or marginalized communities,” says Ms. Dassin.

According to surveys conducted by an outside evaluator — the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands — the program has had some success reaching these individuals, which include people who are disabled, religious and ethnic minorities, and people who live in remote villages or other isolated parts of the world.

Mr. Lawrence, for example, is from Edo in southern Nigeria, an impoverished area where he says “every tongue has been clamoring for development.”

In order to reach people like Mr. Lawrence, Ford established a decentralized — and complex — global structure for the program that involves multiple players.

To run the program, the charitable fund set up a separate organization that is affiliated with the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit group in New York that administers the U.S. government’s Fulbright scholarships.

That group handles the logistics of the Ford fellowships, allowing Ms. Dassin and her staff of seven to oversee the larger tasks, such as setting policy. In addition, the fellowship program relies on 20 foreign nonprofit groups, as well as Ford’s 13 overseas offices, to provide local expertise and even to trek into remote areas to find “off the beaten track” candidates.

In Brazil, for instance, the Carlos Chagas Foundation, in São Paulo, sends envoys more than 2,000 miles to towns along the Amazon River to solicit applications from Afro-Brazilians and the country’s indigenous people.

When the program started, Ford officials were concerned that such applicants would not be able to complete rigorous academic coursework. Early indicators suggest that those worries were unfounded.

For instance, the 67 Ford-sponsored students who have studied at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have earned a 3.58 grade-point average, says Terance W. Bigalke, director of education at the East-West Center, a Honolulu nonprofit group that works with the university to provide English lessons and other academic support to the fellows.

Their achievements have extended beyond getting A’s. Ms. Mohana, for example, made a documentary during her fellowship, The Photo of Luzmila, which explores a family’s struggle to recover from Peru’s bloodly battle between Maoist rebels and government forces during its two-decade “dirty war.” The movie earned a special award for student productions at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. During the fellowship, “I learned how to give words to the victims,” Ms. Mohana says.

Measuring Change

But while the academic and artistic accomplishments are notable, the International Fellowships’ true test will be whether the fellows apply their new education to social change. Ms. Dassin admits that measuring this won’t be easy.

“At the end of the day, of course, we need to know that the fellows are doing the social-justice work that they argued for when they were successful candidates,” she says. “But there’s a long time that needs to elapse between actually selecting someone and when they may come into their own.”

To help stimulate the fellows’ work at home, the program is creating a searchable database of alumni to keep them connected and a daily e-mail newsletter that will announce nonprofit job opportunities in developing nations, and is offering fellows free access to the Foundation Center’s online services, such as lessons on writing grant proposals. The Ford Foundation’s overseas offices also will provide logistical support to help alumni form new nonprofit groups.

The grant maker, however, has not set aside specific money for such organizations, says Ms. Dassin, so that Ford fellows don’t “get into a dependency relationship with us.”

In Vietnam, 15 alumni of the fellowship program have formed the Water Lily Fund to give college scholarships to impoverished students, says Hoang-Yen Vo, who received a Ford fellowship to attend the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, and advance her work as an advocate for the disabled.

The fund, in Ho Chi Minh City, is in the process of registering with the government, but has started to receive small gifts from individuals, says Ms. Hoang, who was stricken with polio at age 2 and walks with the aid of crutches.

She expects contributions to the fund to grow as more people learn about it, thanks in part to its name, which is taken from a flower that has significance in Vietnam. Water lilies are revered in South Asia because they help beautify often-polluted ponds, she says.

“We use the water lily as the image of the community builder.”

The name also reflects the dedication of the Vietnamese fellows — a dedication that the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program hopes to instill it all its participants.

Says Ms. Hoang: “The flower is kind of a symbol of loyalty to the community we are from.”