Together with four South and East African partners, the university has launched an international scientific centre for educational research. The aim: to take educational research and management in Africa to a new level.
The "Centre of Excellence for Educational Research Methodologies and Management", or CERM-ESA for short, involves Moi University (Eldoret, Kenya), Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (Port Elizabeth, South Africa), the University of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and the Uganda Management Institute in Kampala. The project leaders are the economist and Vice President of the University of Oldenburg, Bernd Siebenhüner, and the education researcher Karsten Speck, who also took part in the official opening in Eldoret, Western Kenya, with a delegation from the university. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is funding CERM-ESA together with the Federal Foreign Office.
The aim of the new centre is to conduct scientific research into the education system in East and Southern Africa. In future, academics at the participating universities will receive training to enable them to (even) better support their students and (even) more successfully acquire funding for their research. "With the centre, we want to take educational research and management in Africa to a new level - across national borders and with strong South-South cooperation," says project leader Siebenhüner. CERM-ESA is the seventh such Centre of Excellence on the African continent.
At the opening ceremony at Moi University, the centre also awarded eight scholarships to Master's students from the participating research institutions. In addition to a living allowance, this also includes further education and research stays at the other partner universities.
