Africa Department – Our Programme

The focus countries of KAAD are spread across four regions, each of which has a KAAD partner committee that represents KAAD affairs and plays an important role in the process of pre-selecting applicants. In West Africa the focus country is Ghana, in the Horn of Africa it is Ethiopia and in southern Africa the focus is on Zimbabwe. In East Africa there is a partner committee in the focus country Kenya, but the two neighbouring countries Uganda and Tanzania are also in focus.

In each of the four regions in which the KAAD Africa department is active, there is the possibility of so-called ‘InCountry’ (‘Sur-Place’) scholarships. However, these are limited to scholarships for master's studies. The possible study locations are: Kumasi/Ghana, Addis Ababa/Ethiopia, Nairobi/Kenya and Harare/Zimbabwe. The scholars can complete a master's degree there and are involved in an educational program consisting of thematic meetings, social activities and an annual seminar within the framework of the existing KAAD alumni associations.

In the Africa department, scholarships for Germany are almost exclusively limited to doctorates. The scholars are recruited either from dedicated young academics who are not yet known to KAAD or from the alumni of the Sur-Place/InCountry program who are already part of the KAAD network in their countries.

A focus has emerged on academic subject areas that are considered to be particularly relevant for ‘development’ in the classical sense of the word: health sciences (global/public health, epidemiology, microbiology, etc.), social sciences (politics, sociology, development studies, economics, law with a focus on human rights), agricultural and environmental sciences and engineering. KAAD also has a focus on the academic promotion of artists (several well-known and internationally renowned alumni) and on cultural studies subjects, especially linguistics of African regional languages.

Cooperation with other church or social actors in Germany makes it possible to set further thematic and regional priorities and to support more scholars through third-party funds. An important example of this is the cooperation with the Diocese of Münster for master's and doctoral scholarships aimed at talented young people from northern Ghana. The diocese has five partner dioceses there, in which KAAD was also able to build up a strong network and repeatedly connects with the partnership activities of the diocese of Münster. The five bishops, who are closely associated with KAAD, are thus supported by a grooming experts from various sectors, who not only help shape the universities of northern Ghana, but also the work of the church and the local society.

Another example is cooperation with research networks funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In particular, the ecosystem of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has been the centre of several research phases so far. The researchers from the fields of soil science, ecology, agricultural science and meteorology are now joined by doctoral students in the social sciences, who are looking at the so-called "livelihoods", i.e. the living conditions of the people on Kilimanjaro and their interaction with the ecosystems.