MANKATO — In an age where American colleges and universities are scrambling for international students, Minnesota State University has reached an agreement with an African country that promises to boost its international student numbers and send more MSU students and faculty abroad to study and teach.
A handful of faculty and staff recently returned from Ghana, where they reached an exchange agreement with a university there. The agreement, MSU's first with an African nation, could result in student and faculty exchanges as early as summer.
"We haven't had many students going to study in Ghana," said Caryn Lindsay, the MSU international programs director who made the trip. "We're hoping to improve that, especially given the fact Ghana is politically stable and English speaking."
MSU's path to Ghana started last spring during MSU's annual Pan African Conference. One of the highlighted guests at the conference was Ghanian ambassador Kwasi Adarkwa. He and MSU officials agreed to form multi-disciplinary partnerships between MSU and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
After that, a professor from that university, Sam Afrane (chairman of the Department of Planning at Kwame Nkrumah University), visited MSU to research online teaching and learning, and nonprofit organizations.
The recent trip by MSU faculty and staff was the most recent development.
Included in the trip were: Lindsay, Academic Affairs Vice President Scott Olson, Dean of Institutional Diversity Michael Fagin, faculty members Jackie Vieceli, Karen Chou, Raymond Asomani-Boateng, Tony Filipovitch and Norma Krumweide.
Two focus areas of this trip were nursing and urban studies.
"They're working very hard to address the issue of brain drain within the health field of Africa," Lindsay said. "We're going to be cooperating with them, sending people there, welcoming them here."
Also, two of the faculty members who attended are from the urban and regional studies department including Asomani-Boateng, who is from Ghana, and who Lindsay says initiated the dialogue with Ghana in the very beginning.
Urban and regional studies hopes to share faculty, students and ideas to expand the wealth of knowledge available to students at both universities.
Kwame Nkrumah Univer-sity has about 18,000 students. There are five such universities in Ghana and about 20 smaller private institutions.
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