Notre Dame Global leadership travels across East and West Africa for ‘listening tour’ to deepen research collaborations with African institutions
As the University of Notre Dame works towards its goal of becoming the leading global Catholic research university, forming and maintaining strong partnerships will be essential. Our global partners give us the ability to extend our impact beyond our borders and use our knowledge as a force for good throughout the world. With this in mind, leadership from Notre Dame Global embarked on a “listening and learning” tour this summer to deepen our partnerships in the Global South.
Focusing specifically on our African partners, Vice President & Associate Provost for Internationalization Michael Pippenger and Senior Assistant Provost for Internationalization Jonathan Noble joined Notre Dame Nairobi Director Jackline Oluoch-Aridi for meetings with university and institutional leadership across East and West Africa. The overarching goal of this tour, broken up into two parts and co-led by Noble in the East and Pippenger in the West, was to strengthen collaboration with a network of universities, institutions, and other organizations that are participants in the Pamoja ND Africa Initiative.
Launched in 2022 and culminating with a summit the following year, the Pamoja ND Africa Initiative is a cross-disciplinary space for Notre Dame to deepen its engagement with the African continent through collaborative research, teaching, innovation, and policy outreach. The initiative draws together diverse expertise, experiences, voices, and strengths across Notre Dame and the African continent.
From its start, Pamoja has been defined by its commitment to “co-creation”—a guiding principle for building partnerships in Africa. As Oluoch-Aridi shares, “The existing challenge in collaborative research relationships is the inequitable partnerships between Global North institutions and higher education institutions in African countries. So we said, we're not going to assume the problem. We want to engage with the universities by listening to their concerns with an aim of building stronger partnerships.” She emphasizes how this closely aligns with Catholic Social Teaching, as the listening and learning element puts the dignity of the individual first.
The NDG leadership team met with the top leadership from institutions across the regions—including but not limited to Strathmore University, Uganda Martyrs University, Makeni University, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Université Jésuite d’Abidjan (UJU), and the African School of Economics. With each visit, they sought to gain more knowledge about the value of the network for each partner and to better understand how the Pamoja network can build and strengthen research collaborations that can lead to a positive impact in local communities.
Many of the institutions were already investing in research connected with their local community’s needs. Noble spoke to this, stating, “What really impressed me is the way that these institutions and universities frame education and research as a way to benefit the larger community. We are grateful to the partners for their keen interest in developing collaborative pathways for the Pamoja network of partners as a whole. ” He shared that while the institutions offer a model on how to effectively engage and serve local communities, they could use support with capacity building, which is where Notre Dame, together with the network, can help.
Many of these universities are much younger than Notre Dame and have had limited time and resources dedicated to research. During their visits, the NDG leadership team discovered that strengthening faculty and student exchanges and mobility would be helpful to the partner institutions for accelerating research collaboration. This aligns with one of Pamoja’s key principles of establishing reciprocal engagements with African institutions by amplifying collaborations.
The purpose of these partnerships, and the research and academic collaborations they catalyse, is the ripple effect that they have on their communities. That’s the heart of this initiative—using universities as a tool for solving complex problems and creating impact in local communities. “That’s what we want to achieve in the long term,” Oluoch-Aridi expresses.
The Pamoja partners will use the lessons learned from this “listening tour” to coalesce into an agenda for the 2026 Pamoja summit, which is the next significant step forward in this partnership initiative. “For research collaborations, internationalization is the way of the future,” Oluouch-Aridi says. “We need to get people more engaged in a global village and see each other as institutions that can work together towards a common goal.”
Originally published by at nairobi.nd.edu on September 18, 2025.