APARC Gets $4.2 Million
Money will fund American-African Universities Collaborative
Talk about welcome birthday presents: on its 10th anniversary, Boston University’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC) received a $4.2 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The money, which APARC says is the largest African studies grant ever given to the University, will help fund the center’s six-year-old American
-African Universities Collaborative, which pairs African and American universities, including BU, for videoconferences, roundtable discussions with former African leaders, student fellowships, and other initiatives.
“This extraordinary grant from USAID is a validation of the contribution APARC is making internationally,” says the Rev. Charles Stith, APARC director and a former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania. The collaborative, he says, “has been an important strategy in leadership development on both sides of the Atlantic. The proven success and reach of the AAU Collaborative will expand significantly over the next four years,” the life of the grant.
APARC studies the currents of democratization and free-market reform in Africa, complementing BU’s African Studies Center. Reporting on highlights from its first decade, APARC tells its story in numbers: more than $10 million raised for its programming; more than 20,000 students and faculty from American and African universities cycled through the AAU Collaborative; internships and fellowships arranged for more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students; and six former African heads of state hosted in its African President-in-Residence Program at BU.
Starting in October, APARC will host a yearlong series of scholarly events to celebrate its first decade. Working with the University’s African American Studies Program, it will host the two-day symposium African Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy in late October to examine the contributions of African Americans to the making of U.S. foreign policy.
The series finale will be the African Presidential Roundtable 2011, which will gather former African heads of states to talk about development issues and will be held in Mauritius.
In addition to BU, American universities in the collaborative are Morehouse College, in Atlanta; Elizabeth City State University and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, both in North Carolina; and Medgar Evers College, in Brooklyn.
Participating African schools are the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa; Cape Peninsula University of Technology, in Cape Town, South Africa; the University of Ghana at Legon; and the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.
Rich Barlow can be reached at barlowr@bu.edu.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.