Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program Award

Dr. Sinfree Makoni of the Department of Applied Linguistics and the Program in African Studies was selected to work with Professor I. Khasandi-Telewa of Laikipia University, Kenya on the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to Support Projects in Africa

Sinfree Makoni, from Pennsylvania State University was awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to travel to Kenya to collaborate with Laikipia University and Professor Khasandi-Telewa on curriculum co-development  and enhancement of a taught PhD in Linguistics through online learning and Graduate Student Training and Mentoring.  

The  project is part of a broader initiative that will pair 51 African Diaspora scholars with one of 43 higher education institutions and collaborators in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda to work together on curriculum co-development, research, graduate teaching, training and mentoring activities in the coming months.  The visiting Fellows will work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include controlling malaria, strengthening peace and conflict studies, developing a new master’s degree in emergency medicine, training and mentoring graduate students in criminal justice, archiving African indigenous knowledge, creating low cost water treatment technologies, building capacity in microbiology and pathogen genomics, and developing a forensic accounting curriculum. To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several program alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its sixth year, is designed to increase Africa’s brain circulation, build capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. It is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council. A total of 385 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013.

Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars (individually or in small groups) and cover the expenses for project visits of between 21 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance.

See full list of 2018 projects, hosts and scholars and their universities.

Please direct all questions related to the application process to AfricanDiaspora@iie.org.