President Mary McAleese launches Irish-African Partnership
Wednesday 15 April 2008

Professor Orlando Quilambo, Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique, Professor Rwekaza Mukandala, Vice Chancellor, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, President McAleese, President of Ireland, Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr, Sec General, Association of African Universities, and Professor Livingston S Luboobi, Vice Chancellor, Makerere, Uganda. Pictured at the launch of The Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building (IAPRCB)

The high-level Irish African Partnership for Research Capacity Building (IAPRCB), bringing together academics from fourteen universities in Ireland, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda, and aimed at building capacity for development research in universities in the five partner countries, was launched in DCU last week by President Mary McAleese. Reflecting on her own father’s life, President McAleese noted the similarity and shared experience between the Irish and many African people. She spoke of how her trips to Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda (a trip to Malawi is also planned in the future) and her discussions with rural people there brought to mind her own parent’s and grandparent’s background, noting that this increased the potential for shared understanding and collaboration between people from Ireland and African countries.

The IAPRCB project, which is managed from DCU, has received Euro 1.5 million funding from Irish Aid and Universities Ireland and will run for three years. The project launch in DCU was attended by over sixty senior academics and development researchers who gathered together to celebrate the project’s launch, and to exchange ideas, plans and aspirations for building capacity for development research, both within their universities and within the Irish university sector more broadly. Both President McAleese and Professor Agilakpa Sawyerr, Secretary General of the Association of African Universities and keynote speaker at the workshop, highlighted the importance of education for development, in particular the importance of higher education in informing and directing the trajectories of people and countries in a manner befitting the particular countries and peoples. The importance of developing and informing indigenous knowledge was noted, and the Irish-African Partnership was described as a partnership of the intellectual engines of the five partner countries.

The workshop in DCU is the first in a series of five workshops organised over the three year course of the project. With the concept of partnership at its core, and in a world where inequalities of power and wealth between richer and poorer nations raise significant challenges to putting real partnerships into practice, the project workshops are designed to facilitate participants from the five partner countries in building shared agendas and planning for the future together. Having digested the contributions of President McAleese and Professor Sawyerr, participants spent the remaining three days in DCU engaged in intensive group discussions and deliberations analysing the current situation of development research within their universities and sectors, and planning together for the future. As the facilitator of the workshop reminded participants, ‘we can’t know the future, but we must plan for it’. While such deliberations and planning take time, already the seeds of some concrete ideas for mutually building capacity in development research have begun to emerge. Perhaps even more importantly, also emerging are the beginnings of ongoing professional relationships which will not only drive the project forward over the next three years, but will also form the basis of a core development researcher network on into the future.