Declan I. Onwudiwe from Texas Southern University was awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to travel to Nigeria to work with Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu Alike on capacity building of the masters and doctoral programs, mentoring of graduate students, and curriculum development in criminology and security studies.

The project is designed in collaboration with Dr. Smart Otu to improve the academic and teaching quality of the criminology and security studies at the Ndufu Aliki federal university.  The objective of the project is to help improve the program curriculum, mentoring and training students in criminology and security studies, supervise graduate theses and dissertations, collaborate with faculty on research, and capacity building of the criminology and security studies at the university.

Declan I. Onwudiwe’s 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 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.