Category: Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Gihad Ibrahim, Assistant Professor and E-learning Department Head, Mashreq University

The civil war in Sudan began in April 2023, causing death, hunger, displacement and destruction on a huge scale. Gihad Ibrahim, head of e-learning and senior manager at Mashreq University in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, spoke with The Conversation Africa about how his institution continued to educate thousands of students despite the destruction of its campuses during the ongoing conflict.

What was Mashreq University like before the war?

Mashreq University (established in 2003) was a thriving academic community of over 10,000 students across 10 faculties, including healthcare, engineering, information technology and business. We were known for innovation, being the first in Sudan to offer degrees in fields like artificial intelligence and mechatronics engineering. We ranked highly in both global and national rankings.

Our status as a private university allowed us agility in decision-making and investing in digital infrastructure early, a crucial factor in our later survival. However, our success was also rooted in operating within a national system that, before the war, permitted and accredited such innovation. This highlights a vital policy lesson: governments can foster resilience not by micromanaging, but by creating a regulatory environment that allows universities the autonomy to adapt and invest in their own futures.

Our main campus was in Khartoum North, a hub of student life.

While teaching was primarily in-person, we had already begun integrating online elements for some courses. This digital foundation, though modest, would later become our lifeline.

We established a learning management system back in 2013. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, we were among the few Sudanese universities that could transition seamlessly online.

That crisis was a dress rehearsal; it forced us to build a system for blended learning that saved us when a far greater crisis emerged.

What happened when the fighting broke out in April 2023?

The war began on a Saturday morning – a normal teaching day. Students were already commuting. I remember I had a morning meeting with three female students working on their graduation project. I called one of them immediately and told her to warn the others and return home. Unfortunately, one didn’t get the message and was trapped near campus for two weeks – a harrowing reminder of the immediate human cost.

Our first priority was evacuation. But in those first chaotic hours, our information technology team performed a critical act: an emergency cloud backup of all academic records. It was a decision born of foresight, and it preserved the academic history of thousands.

Within weeks, our main campus was occupied by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). They looted laboratories and burned lecture halls. Because of the buildings’ height, they used them as military positions. Our campus was not just damaged; it was weaponised.

How did you keep teaching after such devastation?

Khartoum became a ghost city. With people fleeing in all directions – to other states or across borders to neighbouring countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia – our university community scattered. The first step was to find them. We launched an online survey to locate our displaced students and staff.

Using that data, we established a network of “teaching centres” in safer locations. We created hubs in Port Sudan (after relocating from the city of Atbara), and internationally in Cairo (in Egypt), Jeddah (in Saudi Arabia), and a virtual campus in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE group was smaller, but because many students there held temporary “war victim” visas that restricted travel, we offered live virtual classes instead of physical ones.

How does this new teaching model work?

We had to be strategic. We categorised every course:

Non-applied courses (like many in business or theory) moved entirely online. Applied courses (like lab sciences) were delivered face-to-face at the teaching centres.

Advanced specialised courses were taught live online to all centres simultaneously.

Consistency was key. Each course had a “lead lecturer” who coordinated content across all locations to ensure every student received the same quality. We partnered with local hospitals and factories for practical training, turning a constraint into an opportunity for real-world learning.

Exams were held online on university tablets, but invigilated in person at the centres to ensure integrity. The system was built on flexibility, but also on rigorous standards.

What lessons has Mashreq University learned?

We learned three profound lessons:

Technology is a lifeline. Our pre-war investment in digital infrastructure was what allowed us to survive.

Flexibility and compassion must replace rigid bureaucracy. We focused on the goal – education – not on the old rules.

Crisis can fuel innovation. Many students gained deeper, more relevant experience training in real hospitals and factories than they ever would in a simulated campus lab.

The most powerful moments have been the messages from graduates. They write to thank us, often noting that their peers at other universities are still waiting, their education frozen. One message captures it all:

You gave me my future back.

This reminds us that education is not a luxury; in times of war, it is a testament to normalcy, hope, and the future.

What comes next?

We have already begun refurbishing our main campus in Khartoum North, hoping to return soon. But the old model is gone for good.

This experience has taught us that education has no borders. It can reach anyone, anywhere, if guided by compassion and strategic purpose.

For universities everywhere, our story is a stark lesson: investing in resilient, flexible systems is not just about innovation; in today’s world, it is fundamentally about survival.

– How a Sudanese university kept learning alive during war
– https://theconversation.com/how-a-sudanese-university-kept-learning-alive-during-war-269325

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Nancy Henaku, Lecturer, Department of English, University of Ghana

Tributes for Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (1948-2025) have been pouring in since her death on 23 October 2025. For many Ghanaians, her broad-ranging empowerment work as leader of the 31st December Women’s Movement is deserving of full recognition. The non-governmental organisation started as a women’s political movement and is still active.

Born on 17 November 1948, she became the wife of Jerry John Rawlings, who governed Ghana from 1981 until he handed over power in 2001.

Mourners, including Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, have referenced Agyeman-Rawlings’ social welfare interventions through her organisation as evidence of her achievements. These include the provision of credit facilities and advocacy for women’s and children’s rights. She also established daycare centres for children, adult literacy centres and edible oil extraction industries.

A dimension of Agyeman-Rawlings’ politics that has been mainly overlooked, however, is her rhetorical leadership. This refers to the various persuasive means through which she performed her roles as a public figure.

I am a scholar of English who studies how people use language and other communicative forms (such as sound and visuals) to influence public discourse. I have used rhetorical and linguistic methods to study various sources on Agyeman-Rawlings, including a personal interview I conducted with her in 2017.

Agyeman-Rawlings’ speeches and writing reveal her motivations for shifting prevailing ideas about women’s social roles, her complex responses to public anxieties about her power (real or imagined) and her attempt at disrupting the archives by narrating herself into history.

Advocating for change

Agyeman-Rawlings’ rhetorical leadership transformed the role of the first lady in Ghana. In her own words:

A first lady’s work does not end with the collection of flowers and doing some protocols … I’d rather work and be emulated than to sit down and not do anything and not change anybody’s life.

For this reason, Agyeman-Rawlings spoke and wrote extensively in national and international contexts. Her rhetoric of empowerment centred the plights of women, children and the poor. For instance, she asserted at Beijing that “for us in Africa, the girl child is a special concern.”

Agyeman-Rawlings articulated a cosmopolitan ideology shaped by multiple influences. These include UN rights discourses, the language of mothering (such as nurturing, protecting), liberal feminism with its emphasis on gender reform through legal means, and the populist rhetoric of the Rawlings regime, with its emphasis on people power.

An assessment of Agyeman-Rawlings’ legacy must recognise that speaking and writing for change involve extensive physical, mental and emotional energy. And for many years, under her husband’s military regime, she performed this role without the professional support of a communications team.

The sociologist Mansah Prah describes Agyeman-Rawlings’ tenure as the era of the “grand feminist illusion” because although her organisations were seemingly pro-woman, their activities did not result in substantial changes in the lives of women.

However, as my research suggests, discussions on the limitations of Agyeman-Rawlings’ advocacy must consider at least two factors. First, the patriarchal postcolonial state always constrains women’s mass efforts at transformation. Second, the discourses that influence Agyeman-Rawlings’ rhetoric are themselves contradictory. For instance, the term “empowerment” is a catchall phrase that means different things to different people. Its vagueness makes it a safe political term. It does not radically shift conversations on gender.

Contesting power

Agyeman-Rawlings had an intense political life. One could say that through her gendered advocacy and mass mobilisation, she politicised the first lady role. For that reason, she was highly scrutinised during her active political years. In response to efforts to restrain her power, she drew on ambiguous gendered rhetorics, moral values and familial legacy

She was variously accused of being corrupt, power drunk and ostentatious, often with sexist undertones.

People rumoured that she, as first lady, was the real power behind the presidency. When her husband was preparing to leave office, there were stories that she wanted to succeed him. One news report claims that she countered such allegations by saying: “I have never said anywhere that I want to be president” while implying that she could change her mind if her husband said so. It takes a keen rhetorical intellect to navigate the slippery political terrain Agyeman-Rawlings found herself in.

She remained politically active after her tenure as first lady ended. In 2011, she contested against John Evans Atta Mills, Ghana’s president at the time, for the candidacy of the National Democratic Congress, which she helped form. She would later defect from the party to form her own, the National Democratic Party.

In these complex political tussles, she consistently appealed to morality and truth. In one instance, she countered ten years of media “bashing” by claiming that she had been raised right. Her 2016 acceptance speech for the National Democratic Party candidacy centred on “what is right” for the “people”.

My interview with her and other primary sources point to the influence of the calm, ethical and non-ideological pragmatism of Agyeman-Rawlings’ father, J.O.T. Agyeman, in her appeal to morality. Her father was a technocrat who was connected to Ghanaians belonging to different sides of Ghana’s two main political traditions, the Nkrumahist and the Danquah-Busia traditions. According to Agyeman-Rawlings, her parents’ home was a space for “spirited” conversations shaped by her father’s emphasis on logical and ethical argumentation rather than parochial political interests. This suggests that examining African first ladies merely in relation to their husbands’ politics, however crucial, would be a limited view.

Disrupting the archive

Agyeman-Rawlings wrote a memoir, unusually for a Ghanaian woman politician. As the historian Jean Allman suggests, there is a connection between the erasure of women in Ghanaian politics and the absence of autobiographical writings by nationalist women. My studies argue that Agyeman-Rawlings’ narrative (though incomplete) should be read as a rhetorical disruption of the postcolonial archives. These archives tend to erase or subordinate women’s contributions within a dominant masculine framing of the nation-state.

Agyeman-Rawlings is not the only woman to have laboured for the nation-state. Other women like pro-independence activist Hannah Kudjoe who were involved in similar social welfare activities have been written out of Ghanaian history. Agyeman-Rawlings understood that despite her extensive work, words still mattered if she was to be remembered.

By asserting that “it takes a woman” to “birth” the strength and future of a nation, she boldly inserts a feminine voice into a postcolonial national allegory that centres men. By so doing, she demands a rereading of “great men” like Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jerry Rawlings. And in the absence of a Jerry Rawlings autobiography, Agyeman-Rawlings’ writing becomes doubly subversive.

Because women have been historically marginalised from the public sphere, a female politician would be scrutinised whether or not she was vocal. Agyeman-Rawlings chose to be visible and outspoken.

– Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings: the first lady who redefined women’s power in Ghana.
– https://theconversation.com/nana-konadu-agyeman-rawlings-the-first-lady-who-redefined-womens-power-in-ghana-269013