Student spotlights - The 'Adilisha' programme
The Adilisha Programme
This spotlight focuses on a programme rather than on an individual student. The Department for Continuing Education’s long-standing involvement in Southern Africa provides an example of our engagement in an overseas region experiencing dramatic change and facing daunting political and social challenges.
Our three-year capacity building ‘Adilisha’ programme worked to support the development of more effective Human Rights advocacy and research into the plight of populations at risk, with a focus on the violation of the Human Rights of women and children. 'Adilisha' is Swahili for 'promoting justice'.
Through implementation of the Bram Fischer Scholarships at the University of Witswatersrand, we provided professional support and development for young black academics in South Africa, helping to transform Higher Education opportunities for historically disadvantaged communities. The scholarship programme, brought successive cohorts of young academics to Oxford for six months at a time to undertake individual research and professional development in all aspects of university teaching, research and policy.
Activity drawing on the first phase of the ‘Adilisha’ programme is continuing in Kenya and Malawi.
This innovative programme was shortlisted for the Stockholm Prize (awarded for outstanding achievements in the application of research to the advancement of Human Rights) and was recognised with a Microsoft Award for its outstanding work in using educational technology for humanitarian purposes.
More recently, we partnered Higher Education institutions in South Africa to open up university education to the populations of the former townships. By adapting and making freely available our online teaching resources in developing study skills, the ‘Masifunde’ (a Xhosa expression for ‘let us learn’) project, funded as part of the English-African Partnership programme by the British Government and the British Council, now supports hundreds of young students in acquiring the intellectual skills and confidence to undertake university education. One of the students (pictured) commented: ‘This course has been a bright light which has lit the darkness surrounding my studying techniques.’
The Department worked with thirty five Human Rights NGOs throughout the region of sub-Saharan Africa, including Malawi, Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania.
The Adilisha project was funded by the European Commission, the British Department for International Development and the Canadian Government. It employed distance-learning resources, CD-ROM based interactive materials and in-region workshops to enhance the capacity of Human Rights NGOs in the fields of fact-finding and investigation, monitoring and reporting, and making representations and advocacy.