Six scholarship holders of the DAAD-funded SDG Graduate School – Ghana, have received laptops and other souvenirs to aid them in their academic work.

The presentation of the laptops was done at a short ceremony presided over by the Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, Prof. Rosemond Boohene. 

The scholarship holders are the third cohort of beneficiaries from the SDG Graduate School program in Ghana. The overall project, titled Performing Sustainability: Cultures and Development in West Africa, is a research cooperation between the Universities of Cape Coast (Ghana), Maiduguri (Nigeria) and Hildesheim (Germany).  

The Pro Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Rosemond Boohene presenting a laptop to a scholarship holder 

At the ceremony, Dr. Eric Debrah Otchere recounted the history of the project and its overall impact on the University of Cape Coast.  He noted that since the inception of the project in 2016, up to 18 PhD students spread across the Departments of Music and Dance, Geography and Regional Planning, Classics and Philosophy, Sociology, English, Centre for African and International Studies (CAIS), Centre for Entrepreneurship and Small Scale Development (CESED) and School for Development Studies (SDS) had benefitted from the scholarships.

 Beyond the course work in their respective departments, scholarship holders receive monthly stipends, take part in monthly online colloquia and two annual workshops: one at the University of Cape Coast and the other in Abuja, Nigeria.  They also get a research stay in Germany during their final year in the program.  The SDG Graduate school has also convened a number of writing workshops which have been beneficial to participants from all the colleges in the University.  This writing workshop’s model has now been adopted by the UCC School of Graduate Studies to facilitate the completion rates of graduate students.

For her part, the Prof. Boohene expressed gratitude to the SDG Board and urged the scholarship holders to take advantage of the scholarship to make a good impact in their communities.

The Pro Vice-Chancellor chairing the meeting

The Pro Vice-Chancellor further admonished the students to justify the investment being made in them by studying hard and completing their programmes on time

She advised them to be disciplined so that the tenure of the sponsorship would be extended to benefit other students and faculty of the University.

On behalf of DAAD, the Pro Vice-Chancellor presented the laptops to the scholarship holders.

Currently, seven SDG Graduate Schools are funded across the world four in Africa, two in Latin America, and one in Asia. The partner universities can flexibly use a broad range of DAAD instruments for the establishment and further development of these SDG Graduate Schools. In the short and medium term, the SDG Graduate Schools are expected to increase teaching capacities by incorporating information and communication technologies (ICT).

Present at the ceremony were the Ghana Director of the project, Dr. Eric Debrah Otchere, the project steering committee members; Prof. Sarah Darkwah, Dr. Theresa Ennin and Dr. Madinatu Bello; and the Ghana coordinator, Dr. Sabina Appiah-Boateng.  

Source: Documentation and Information Section-UCC