Call for Partnerships with African Higher Education

The French National Research Agency (ANR) launches the first call on « Partnerships with the African Higher Education », funded by the French Development Agency (AFD), in the context of the « Bienvenue en France » strategy hold by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for Higher Education, Research and Innovation, and Campus France. This actions aims at long-term partnership projects between one or more French Higher Education institutes and an African Higher Education institute, for graduate, master and PhD courses in some given activity sectors. 

To foster the development of strategic sectors for African economies, the main targets are:

• to offer African students the possibility of finding in their own countries or regions high-quality formations, since graduate level, to respond to the local socio-economic needs;
• to help actors of the French Higher Education sector in the development of partnerships with their African counterparts ;
• to foster students and teachers mobility between French and African partners.

In a transversal way, projects should favor the access, the participation and the permanence of women in the selected activity sectors.

The PEA program is limited to the 18 African countries defined as priority from the French government Committee for international cooperation and development (CICID):  : Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Comores, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Chad and Togo.

Moreover, those components of institutes, or those institutes which already benefited of subventions from AFD for an amount above 500 000€, or subventions from the World Bank, namely in the framework of the program “African Centers for Excellence (ACE)” are not eligible, as well as all projects focusing on the petrochemical and nuclear industries.

Each project will be coordinated from one side by a higher education institute of one of the African priority countries, and one or more higher education French institutes from the other.

Selected projects will be funded for 4 years, for an amount between 1,5 and 3,5 M€.