Report

Jürgen Theiss gives presentation at UNESCO Meeting of Higher Education Partners
Paris, France
14th June 2000

UNESCO Webpage announcing the meeting:

http://www.unesco.org/education/educnews/20_06_14/education.htm

Jürgen Theiss' presentation:

Personal experiences with the management of scholarship assistance

(The last paragraph is about the Berlin-Nairobi Physics Student Exchange)

As a recent PhD graduate in applied mathematics I have been asked to give a personal account of my experiences with the management of scholarship assistance. I would like to summarise my experiences in four brief points.

My first point is about international scholarship assistance. As a German national with a British university degree I had great difficulties in obtaining a scholarship for my research towards a PhD degree. Only the European Union offered a suitable scholarship scheme from which I eventually obtained funding. However, this scheme has been terminated. Having made this experience within Europe, I can only emphasise that scholarship assistance should go hand in hand with the increased mobility of academics.

My second point is about small hardship and small project scholarships. I was impressed when I noticed that the University of Cambridge has small scholarships available which can be given out for almost any good reason, whether it be a temporary hardship or a promising project idea. I think that such small and especially affordable scholarships can help unlock great potential and should be broadly available.

My third point is about loans. Based on my own experience I think they should not be the standard form of scholarship assistance due to the resulting debts but should be available if there are no other options to support the training.

My fourth and last point, and the one I feel most strongly about, is the great importance of scholarship assistance needed for less common types of co-operation in higher education. As an example I would like to talk about the physics student exchange I am developing and running between Berlin and Nairobi. In its current early stage, physics students from the Free University Berlin are sent to study at the University of Nairobi for a semester or a year. I see my project as a small contribution to strengthen the cooperation in physics between the industrialised world and Africa which is still weak. The reason for this weak cooperation might be that the industrialised world is underestimating Africa's potential in physics. What such a co-operation can achieve, however, was most clearly pointed out by the Head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Nairobi. He said that by trusting the University of Nairobi in educating Berlin physics students the Free University Berlin gives them a sense of dignity, a sense of being on equal terms (*). This trust by the one partner and the improved self-esteem of the other partner is crucial in the co-development in higher education between the industrialised world and Africa. In this co-development, scholarship assistance is of great importance, not only because of the financial support it provides, but also because it gives formal acknowledgement to less common types of co-operation such as this. Thank you.

(*) Two people in the audience grumbled because, as I believe, they were abset about that statement. As no discussion or clarification was possible during the meeting I would like to comment here on my statement. I only intended to emphasise the advantage of a student exchange as a base for co-development in higher education because of the fact that students are not going to Africa as consultants to give advice to an African university but rather to learn from an African university. This, I think, is a novel, much needed and promising aspect of co-development in higher education between the industrialised world and Africa. At the reception at the end of the meeting I was approached by participants who agreed on my point and encourged me strongly to continue the work on the student exchange.