The West-African countries Ghana and Nigeria have become increasingly important collaboration countries for the University of Eastern Finland. Annually UEF receives, on average, over 300 applications into its international Master’s degree programmes from these countries. Over the years, 305 students from Ghana and 329 students from Nigeria have studied at UEF. Indeed, students from Ghana and Nigeria form the largest African student population at UEF, with 58 students from Ghana and 71 students from Nigeria currently enrolled.
Collaboration in education and research between UEF and Nigerian institutions has in the past encompassed ICT in health but has since evolved, and discussions are underway on environmental and chemistry related education and research collaboration with the University of Lagos.
Collaboration with Ghana, on the other hand, is much more active and covers a wide range of subjects from forest and environmental sciences to photonics, pharmacy and nursing sciences. UEF and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology have collaborated for years in pharmacy training, whereas UEF and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of Ghana’s College of Science and Technology offer a virtual course together: Ecosystem Restoration in the Tropics and Climate Change, funded by the Finnish University Partnership for International Development, UniPID.
In addition, UEF’s Department of Physics and Mathematics is in close collaboration with their Ghanaian alumni who recently set up Photonics Ghana, which aims to advocate for and enhance the field of photonics in Ghana and the wider Africa region. Indeed, the high quality of photonics research at UEF and Photonics Ghana has been recognised: Benjamin Osae Asamoah, Early Stage Researcher in photonics, has just been awarded the 2021 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by SPIE , the International Society for Optics and Photonics, for his potential contributions to the field of optics, photonics or related field.
Formalising partnerships
Finland’s Ambassador to Nigeria and Ghana, H.E. Jyrki Pulkkinen and Commercial Counsellor Tarvo Nieminen visited UEF and met with the university’s researchers, as well as with representatives of Savonia University of Applied Sciences and business operators in Kuopio.
Ambassador Pulkkinen expressed his delight in the many collaborations and activities between UEF and its partners in both Ghana and Nigeria:
“It is wonderful to see how active UEF is in the two countries and this also holds a good foundation for commercial activity between businesses in Finland, Nigeria and Ghana. There are many opportunities for commissioned education too, and Finnish institutions should take more initiative to explore the opportunities present,” he says.
“Collaboration between UEF and both Ghana and Nigeria has recently been strengthened by the signing of two Memoranda of Understanding (MOU). They are based on earlier collaboration between researchers and educators at the School of Nursing and our partner organisations, where they have identified mutual areas of interest,” Dean Jussi Pihlajamäki of the Faculty of Health Sciences at UEF says.
One of the MOUs is with the University of Ghana and covers collaboration in education and research in the field of health sciences, and in particular in nursing sciences. The MOU grew out of mobility actions enacted between the partners, funded by the Erasmus + Global Mobility Programme.
The other MOU is with Villanova University in the State of Pennsylvania (USA), the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and the Public Health Foundation of India (India), and it focuses on developing an academic course on Global Climate Change and Health. The collaboration is a result of mobility actions enacted through the Fulbright Foundation, which funded Professor Ruth McDermott-Levy’s (Villanova University) to UEF, and connections to UEF alumni in Nigeria and network collaboration with the Public Health Foundation of India.
“Formalising the partnerships enables us to work together in a more consolidated and focused fashion towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal number 3: good health and well-being. We are excited at the prospects this brings for us and our partners,” says the University of Eastern Finland’s Rector Jukka Mönkkönen.
“Mobility actions and our alumni have proved very important for the development of international collaboration,” UEF’s Director of International Affairs Riikka Pellinen emphasises.
