Ghana

If the scholarship goes well, Chanrai will consider supporting more youth in Ghana and enlisting other affluent families to do the same.

The three-day event that took place in Accra featured panels with African experts in fields such as finance, entrepreneurship, diplomacy and arts. Chanrai, who was instrumental in organizing the summit, is truly a global citizen. If it goes well, he is considering supporting more young people in Ghana and enlisting other affluent African families to do the same. Family members believe in giving back to society, he says. “In my immediate family we believe that what’s most important is education,” Chanrai says. The first recipient is Kelvin Amakyea, who will be pursuing a master’s degree at Northeastern.

Northeastern students who participated in Dialogues of Civilization in Ghana went on to become Fulbright scholars, doctors and teachers.

She is also looking for ways to increase the number of Black Northeastern students, especially males, in her Ghana dialogue programs. “Starting when I return back from Ghana, I will be going to every Dollar Tree store and every Walmart buying these dollar packs of toothbrushes,” Johnson says. One time, Johnson and dialogue students visited an orphanage where children slept on the bare floor instead of the bunk beds because they didn’t have mattresses. One student wrote a book inspired by their experience, and Johnson has written quite a few recommendation letters for extended study abroad experiences and professional practices former students chose to pursue after going to Ghana. Before embarking on the trip, students are required to read “Homegoing,” a historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi. Many of them talk about how they changed, what they gained and what kind of work or research they hope to do after college. “Or if they have experienced it, to show them a different way of experiencing it from an academic perspective.” At that time Johnson was the director of the College Student Development and Counseling program at Northeastern University. They are short-term faculty-led study programs focused on critical issues facing society and offered during the summer in different locations around the world. The American College Personnel Association was organizing a trip to Ghana to see how student affairs and administrative hiring is handled in that country, and Johnson decided to go. [Vanessa Johson](https://bouve.northeastern.edu/bchs/directory/vanessa-d-johnson/) grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but when she first stepped on the tarmac of the airport in Accra in 2006 it felt like Ghana had called her—like in the [W.E.B. “I just got this feeling,” she says.

The gender composition from nine Ghanaian universities based on data from the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission showed that: only 10.2% of all full.

For example, in Australia, women held 54.7% of lecturer ranks, 46.8% of senior lecturer ranks, and only 33.9% of women held ranks above senior lecturer. In Sierra Leone, out of the 1779 full time academic staff only 267 were women representing only 18% of the total academic staff. Women accounted for just 14.2% of those ranked as Associate Professors, only 13.4% of senior lecturers were women; the figure was 22.8% for lecturers and 26.4% for assistant lecturers.