BAFADIA · Building Academic Freedom And Democracy In Africa

This Fellowship’s purpose is a comparative assessment of the protection for, and health of, academic freedom in the African nations, currently a vastly under-researched field, and a subsequent analysis of most relevant best practice for the protection of academic freedom in the EU, which can then aid the derivation of an African model of the concept, which will be disseminated across, and embedded within, universities in Africa. To achieve this, the project will unite the Fellow, who has a wide knowledge of academic freedom and human rights issues in Africa, with the Researcher in Charge, who has experience and expertise in assessing the protection of academic freedom in different states, to produce together new knowledge which will be disseminated across both Africa and the EU. The long-term effect of this research will be to substantially increase the institutional collaboration between universities in Africa and the European Union, enabling greater protection of academic freedom via the joint development of governance structures, processes and protocols. Additionally, through the mobility to the EU of a leading African human rights researcher, the project will facilitate aid and encourage greater teaching links and research collaboration, and academic and scientific outputs between the universities in the two continents. The main academic subject areas which relate to academic freedom are higher education policy and international law. However, by promoting greater collaboration at institutional, rather than subject, level this project will generate greater intercontinental collaboration across a wide range of academic disciplines, via increases in the number of EU-African university collaborations.