Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program

Objectives

·       To create a network of actual contacts between distinguished scholars in the universities in the region;

·      To give African scholars the opportunity to debate their new ideas with colleagues, students and decision makers in various countries before committing them to publication, which most cases takes place outside the region and does not alleviate the book famine back home;

·      To allow some young scholars from the North to benefit from such an exchange programme and give maturity to their own thoughts while encouraging their African audience to do likewise through organised debates;

·      To ensure that topical issues such as empowerment of the people, democracy from the grassroots, Africa’s place in the new economic order, issue of ethnicity, gender and regional conflicts, environmental crisis, the place of indigenous knowledge in present production systems and an African agenda beyond year 2000 will be the areas of concentration of the first two years programme;

·      To use the opportunity of such a visit to start building a network of researchers around one or more of the above mentioned topics

·      To publish a number of the public lectures in this programme in OSSREA’s Occasional Paper Series.