McCormack Institute Team Embark on Economic Development in Africa

By Edmund Beard and Margery O'Donnell

On January 21, a team from UMass Boston including Ed Beard, Margery O'Donnell, and Charles Ndungu of the McCormack Institute, and Brian Thompson of the Modern Languages Department, were in Saint Louis, Senegal, to celebrate the opening of a multifunction community resource center designed to serve as an engine of local economic development in northern Senegal.

Built under a grant to the McCormack Institute from the Education for Development and Democracy Initiative (EDDI), and growing out of an earlier USAID-funded Partnership in Higher Education between the institute and Universite Gaston Berger de Saint Louis, the community resource center includes a café, cybercafé, women's center, sewing workshop, classrooms, and associated agricultural and transport initiatives.

The inauguration of the center was attended by US State Department and USAID officials, cabinet-level and regional Senegalese officials, the rector and senior administrative staff of Universite Gaston Berger, and hundreds of local residents.

Following the inauguration, members of the McCormack team continued on to South Africa, where institute director Edmund Beard signed a memorandum of understanding with Ahmed Kathrada, director of the Mayibuye Center at the University of the Western Cape (and one of four leaders jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island at the start of the black liberation movement in South Africa). The Mayibuye Center's archives are creating a unique oral history of that struggle based on McCormack Senior Fellow Padraig O'Malley's decade-long project to capture the South African transition in the words of the actors themselves. Now totaling over 2,000 hours of taped interviews, the O'Malley audio recordings are being indexed and placed on CD-ROM for distribution to all schools and libraries in South Africa. O'Malley is at work on six separate books based on the collection.

Finally the McCormack team moved on to Kenya, where, with additional EDDI support, they are developing a new partnership with Egerton University in Njoro. And with the Maasai Education Discovery initiative, where they hope to replicate the success in Narok, Senegal.

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