Thank you for 2024. Looking forward to 2025 with Africa’s Century strategy in focus

Thank you for 2024. We are looking forward to 2025 and our coming initiatives under the new strategy “Africa’s Century” for strengthened Danish engagement with African countries.

2024 has been a busy and rewarding year for Danida Fellowship Centre and our partners. We launched several new initiatives, some driven by ourselves, and others driven by our partners.

In 2024, the Danish government launched its new strategy Africa’s Century for Denmark’s engagement with African countries. This strategy highlights Denmark’s commitment to equal partnerships, knowledge sharing and stronger collaboration with African countries to promote sustainable development.

For Danida Fellowship Centre, this approach is not entirely new. Knowledge exchange and mutual capacity building lie at the heart of our mandate and mission. We support Denmark’s strategic sector cooperation with emerging economies through our learning programmes. We provide grants for development research and facilitate collaboration between Danish universities and selected university partners in the Global South. We also manage the Danida Fellows Network, which is available for our current and former fellows, and counts more than 35.000 professionals from the Global South.  In the future, as in the past, we are committed to facilitating and brokering knowledge exchange, mutual learning and mutual understanding.

We are, therefore, excited to play our part in implementing the strategy for strengthened Danish engagement with African countries. We have already been laying the groundwork.

Our portfolio of activities is broad and we do not target specific demographic groups. However, the growing youth demographic in Africa demands attention. By 2100, 40 percent of the world’s workforce will be in Africa. Recognising this, we supported several initiatives in 2024 aimed at nurturing young people’s talents and professional expertise to help solve local and global challenges.

In August 2024, we welcomed 17 young professionals who are partnering with Denmark through the strategic sector cooperation in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco and South Africa.  The 17 young professionals are on two-year Master’s programmes at Danish universities. They will, undoubtedly, return to their home countries with valuable experiences and an excellent network of students and professionals they will have met during their study stay in Denmark.  In February, the 17 will be joined by 11 more DFC supported Master’s students from the African continent.

Another key initiative for talented youth was DTU Skylab’s Next Generation Action summit, which focused on digital innovation in 2024. More than 130 students, academics and entrepreneurs from across the globe participated in online training followed by face2face collaboration and participation in the 2024 Digital Tech Summit in Denmark. By supporting participants from Ghana, India, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania, Danida Fellowship Centre made a substantial contribution to the 2024 Next Generation summit.

Our youth engagement also included the Empowerment of Youth to Influence SDG Implementation programme, facilitated by Beyond2030. In 2024, 21 young leaders from Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Mali, South Africa, South Sudan and Burundi took part in the programme. As part of their learning journey, these SDG youths participated in Denmark’s People’s Meeting (Folkemødet) on Bornholm, where they actively engaged in debates on SDG implementation, youth participation, and other pressing global issues.

The SDG youths’ journey culminated in their participation at YouLead, East Africa’s largest youth leadership summit in Tanzania. Danida Fellowship Centre has supported YouLead since joining the Together for Impact partnership with MS TCDC in Arusha, Tanzania, in 2022. Every year, YouLead brings together hundreds of young leaders from across the African continent to discuss pressing issues under a shared theme. This year, the theme was the future of Africa’s education.

In 2024, YouLead became a key platform for many of our youth engagement initiatives. At the summit, the group of young people who had participated in the SDG learning programme in Denmark engaged with other young business and political leaders, including participants from the EAC Youth Fellowship, which is also supported by Danida Fellowship Centre. The EAC Youth Fellowship focuses on youth-led action in climate change, digital and green transitions, and business and regional development. Together with the rest of the summit’s participants, they all developed a shared vision for the future of education in Africa, setting the stage for a more inclusive and transformative educational landscape. Read the YouLead24 Report.

Adding to the story about how we supported the agency and capacity of Africa’s youth in 2024 is the call for more women in research.

Across the globe, and particularly in Africa, men continue to dominate academia, resulting in an overrepresentation of male perspectives in research and teaching. To address this, 50 women researchers — including Danida-supported scholars and ditto members of the MS TCDC and YouLead networks — gathered in March 2024 for the More Women in Research seminar. This event led to the creation of a call to action (a manifesto) for increased representation of women in research. The manifesto, which is directed at key decision makers, was launched at the YouLead summit, and sparked much-needed intergenerational dialogue between experienced researchers and the next generation of female academics. This dialogue aims to promote gender equity in research and empower the next generation of women researchers to contribute even more to solving global challenges.

Ulla Næsby Tawiah
Director, Danida Fellowship Centre

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