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MACHAKOS UNIVERSITY SELECTED TO HOST CARNEGIE AFRICAN DIASPORA FELLOW
Collaborative Project will focus on Curriculum Co-development and Postgraduate Program Capacity Building for Employable Skills in Public Health Courses. Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to Support Projects at 43 Universities in Africa
Machakos, May, 2018 – Machakos University was selected by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program(CADFP) to host an African Diaspora scholar from the United States to work with on a collaborative project on reforming curriculum content with regard to quality and relevance of degree programmes in the School of Pure and Applied Sciences as well as the School of Health Sciences, to develop, mentor and enhance courses in Biostatistics, Epidemiology, public and community heath. The project seeks to develop courses and strategies in collaborative research in the design and analysis of community intervention trials, basic science studies including proteomics and glycomics. The project will also involve research and capacity building focusing on meta-analysis, adoption design methods in clinical trials, structural equation modelling, statistical methods in epidemiology and application of complex survey. Together with the members of the School of Health Sciences and other schools of related interests, Prof. Makambi will lead efforts to undertake an in-depth curricula review based on the outcomes of the current deficiencies with the objective of enhancing the competencies and employability of Machakos University graduates.
Dr. Stephen Mailu, the Dean, School of Pure and Applied Sciences and Dr. Esther Nduku, Dean, School of Health Sciences will lead the project, together with Prof. Kepher Makambi, a Fellow from Georgetown University, USA.
The project objectives are:
1) To facilitate initiatives in reviewing and reforming curriculum content with regard to quality and relevance of courses and programmes in the Schools of Health Sciences and Pure and Applied Sciences. The aim is to enhance the competencies and employability of the graduates by bridging curriculum deficiencies.
2) To train academic staff on competence-based learning and content delivery skills.
The aim is to:
a) Enhance best classroom practices,
b) Improve mentoring and advisory skills,
c) Enhance commitments to the core values and objectives of higher education.
3) To enhance faculty competencies in conducting assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes among students. The aim is to improve the quality of the student as it brings out holistic performance beyond the book work usually emphasized in traditional assessment methods, hence improving quality of university education.
The above objectives are founded on the observed trends that seem to affect university education in Kenya. University education in Kenya has been observed not to meet market needs and thus in need of reforms to improve quality, and relevance. Further, sub-programmes or course units have been elevated to full degree programme status by a number of universities so as to have something to offer in order to be competitive. This makes a number of degree programmes not only narrow in scope but also have insufficient content hence not meeting society and economic needs that are dynamic. It appears that such emerging programmes only exist to differentiate programmes amongst universities rather than update content and come up with new areas of knowledge; therefore diluting quality of education. It is further alleged that undergraduate academic programmes include content that has no value to society and to the students, only burdening parents in terms of affordability. Many courses undertaken; called university wide courses and differentiating courses for universities end up making programmes too heavy with irrelevant content that does not support desired learning outcomes. Content often is not tailored to industry needs, also because these stakeholders are not consulted in content design; this need to change or a reformation is required in programme content.
The Machakos University project is part of a broader initiative that will pair55CADFP scholarswith one of 43higher 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 visiting Fellows will work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include controlling malaria, strengthening peace and conflict studies, developing a new master’s degree in emergency medicine, training and mentoring graduate students in criminal justice, archiving African indigenous knowledge, creating low-cost water treatment technologies, building capacity in microbiology and pathogen genomics, and developing a forensic accounting curriculum.To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several CADFP alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.
The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its fifth 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 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 335 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.
Please direct all questions related to the application process to AfricanDiaspora@iie.org.