African School of Economics expands to Zanzibar

Unguja. The African School of Economics (ASE), a Pan-African university has announced its expansion to Zanzibar.

This is the university's first location in East Africa, and it will provide a state-of-the-art campus for African students and world-class faculty.

ASE will also be the latest addition to the Silicon Zanzibar initiative as it begins the next phase of its growth plan to become the go-to Pan-African center of higher learning.

ASE will collaborate with well-known educational institutions such as Princeton University and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to provide graduate and undergraduate degree programs focused on STEM and social science education through three departments: the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business, and the Engineering School.

Strategically, it will be the first campus to focus on technology, with the goal of becoming a part of the Silicon Zanzibar tech ecosystem.

ASE is dedicated to actively participating in the launch of tech startups, training the human capital and skills necessary to enable the development and commercialization of new technologies and the incubation of innovative businesses.

To assist with the upcoming launch, the university will also accelerate its current recruitment drive to bring in 50 top faculty members and 900 students from all over the world, providing the highest quality of education to ensure that African students can compete on a global scale.

Professor Leonard Wantchekon, founder and president of ASE, says that since its founding in 2014, the vision for ASE has always been to establish a Pan-African system of universities.

“And with our first launch in East Africa, it was crucial that we choose an environment that strongly reflected our ethos. At ASE, we firmly believe that it is not enough to train STEM talent; we must also create an enabling policy environment that empowers their ideas to truly scale."

He added; Through its Silicon Zanzibar initiative, Zanzibar has made significant progress in this regard by establishing policies that strongly encourage frontier innovation. Coupled with its strong entrepreneurial spirit and close proximity to a number of well-regarded East African universities, we are fully convinced that these qualities make Zanzibar the ideal location to spearhead the next chapter of our Pan-African expansion.

"For the past 12 years, Princeton's Department of Politics has served as an incubator for ASE. Last year, an ASE alum earned his Princeton Ph.D. and has been appointed assistant professor at New York University (NYU), a world-class university. We congratulate ASE on the expansion of its mission of excellence in research and training to a second regional hub on the continent," said Professor Rodney Priestley, Dean of the Graduate School.

ASE was founded in Benin in 2014 to address the twin challenges of a lack of African representation at the forefront of cutting-edge research and limited training of top-tier talent on the continent.

With over 2,000 students and alumni, 12+ degree programs, and four campuses across its Benin, Côte D'Ivoire, Nigeria, and Zanzibar locations, it ranks as one of Africa's leading universities in terms of research quality, the caliber of faculty and students, and its outstanding record of graduate placements.

Over the past 7 years, more than 15 percent of ASE graduates have been placed in top global PhD programs at institutions such as Princeton, Harvard University, Penn State University, and the University of Wisconsin. 75 percent of graduates have research, government, and private sector positions both in global and regional offices at UNDP, the Central Bank of West African States, the governments of Togo, Benin, and Cameroon, as well as a Junior faculty position at New York University.

Zanzibar’s minister for education Lela Mussa on her part said Zanzibar is pursuing education transformation to achieve its national development vision.

“We are encouraging international universities and higher learning institutions to establish campuses here in the islands to support human capital development."

In addition to its purely academic pursuits, ASE's planned campus in Silicon Zanzibar will also begin to establish a robust network of campuses that serve as high-quality anchor tenants to nascent free economic zones and charter cities across the continent..

Daniel Yu, Founder and CEO of Wasoko, Africa's largest B2B e-commerce network and the official private sector ambassador for Silicon Zanzibar, believes that ASE's presence in Zanzibar will undoubtedly have a transformative impact on the development of a crucial pipeline of tech talent for the island and beyond.

“We look forward to exploring areas of collaboration alongside them in the near future."