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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: B10-01. To panel B10.

Title of paper:

Authors:

Tereza Nemecková (Metropolitan University Prague);

Josef Novotný (Charles University).

Long abstract paper:
Sponsoring studies of citizens from developing countries at universities in developed countries has been for decades an instrument of official development aid of many 'Western' donors. The recent inclusion of development-oriented international scholarships among the targets of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 further legitimated these traditional schemes and encouraged 'emerging' donors to introduce such programmes. The international scholarship programmes contain a clear migration-development aspect and they can also be considered as an instrument of high skilled-labor and knowledge migration. However, their expected development impacts, most typically grounded in the idea of 'exporting' university knowledge from more to less developed countries, depend on several uncertain parameters. Despite the declared development focus, they may further exacerbate rather than reduce the increasingly unequal distribution of benefits from internationalization of higher education.

The Czech government scholarship programme for university students from developing countries has a long history dating back to the Cold War cooperation of Czechoslovakia within a Soviet-led socialist bloc of countries. In 1990s it became a part of the Czech development cooperation programme and since then it has been fully funded from the Czech official development aid budget. In this paper, we examine the selected programme's development impacts. In particular, we focus on the scholarship beneficiaries from Africa. We acknowledge that development-oriented international scholarships programmes may be conceived from different theoretical perspectives that may lead to different expected outcomes. Therefore, we confront the development outcomes identified for the Czech scholarships programme against these distinct perspectives. We focus on issues such as the return migration after graduation, or transformative power of scholarships with regard to individual's capabilities, among others. Our analysis is based on quantitative and qualitative data collected for the programme's two consecutive external evaluations (2011, 2018). The research covered the period from 2008 to 2017 in which around 1,100 beneficiaries from more than 60 developing countries were financially supported.

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