Centres of excellence in Africa: top training for the decision-makers of tomorrow

Enlarge image (© Eric Miller) The German Foreign Office and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) are supporting master and doctoral training of the highest standard with five centres of excellence at important African universities. In terms of content, the focus lies on subjects of major social relevance. Across subject divisions, emphasis is also being placed on building a close network of partners for the democratic and economic development of Africaand cooperation with Germany. At the end of January 2011 Africa and German researchers and doctoral students met in Cape Town. They also included the team from the Tanzanian-German Centre for Postgraduate Studies in Law.

African and German scholars teach and research together in the five DAAD centres of excellence in Africa. These centres have been established since 2008 with funding from the Federal Foreign Office’s Aktion Africa programme – with the goal of supporting research and training capacities at important African higher education institutions. “We aim to improve structures and support future decision-makers in Africa,” says Dr Dorothee Weyler, the responsible DAAD project manager. The centres are intended to build a closely knit network of partners for the future of Africa and for cooperation with Germany. At the network meeting of the DAAD centres of excellence in Africa, which was held in Cape Town at the end of January, lecturers and doctoral students had an opportunity to engage in an in-depth exchange of views.

  Enlarge image (© Eric Miller)

In terms of content, the focus is clearly on key themes of societal development. Thus, the centre of excellence in Ghana concentrates on development and health research, while the centre in the Democratic Republic of the Congo focuses on microfinance, the centre in Namibia on logistics and the centre in South Africa on development research and criminal justice. The Tanzanian-German Centre for Postgraduate Studies in Law, or TGCL for short, is run jointly by the departments of law at the universities of Bayreuth and Dar es Salaam. Every year the TGCL trains ten master of law students as well as five doctoral students within a three-year doctoral programme. Ulrike Wanitzek, the project manager at the centre of excellence, is law professor at the Institute of African Studies and the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Bayreuth. She coordinates the work jointly with her Tanzanian colleague Dr Kennedy Gastorn.

The main emphases at the TGCL, which is open to students from the five countries of the East African Community (EAC), are constitutional law, human rights and comparative law. Tanzanian doctoral student Lilian Mongella, for example, investigates reparations for victims of political conflicts and human rights violations in Rwanda and the need for common statutory rules. Anatole Nahayo from Burundi sees his training here as a “golden opportunity”. He has specialised in tax law and is investigating how the five countries’ income tax systems could be harmonised. The up-and-coming jurists benefit from the cooperation with Germany in a variety of ways: they appreciate the lectures by German visiting professors and research stays in Bayreuth and can also attend seminars on German and European Union (EU) law.

The five centres of excellence in Africa do not just work alone. In Cape Town the lecturers also used the multi-day conference to sound out opportunities for cooperation – for a joint PhD summer school, for instance. After all, despite the centres’ different subject orientations, they all face similar challenges. “It is surprising how much we have in common, above all when it comes to themes such as good governance, development and the fight against poverty,” says Gastorn. “We used to see ourselves purely as lawyers or as experts in logistics or microfinance, but it is becoming increasingly important to work in an interdisciplinary way. Irrespective of whether you are in Accra, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa or Windhoek: “We all have the same goal,” says Kennedy Gastorn. Professor Wanitzek adds: “And in the process we are jointly breaking new ground in qualifying future leaders in Africa.”

Text: Corinna Arndt, Janet Schayan/Societäts-Medien