The African School of Economics (ASE) has officially announced its expansion to Zanzibar.
It marks the university’s first location in East Africa, with plans for a campus for African students and world-class faculty.
In partnership with renowned educational institutions including Princeton University and Indian Institute of Technology Madras, ASE will deliver graduate and undergraduate degree programs focused on STEM and social science training. It will do so through three departments – the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business, and the Engineering School.
It is the first campus to have a focus on technology, aiming to become part of the tech ecosystem in Silicon Zanzibar.
To support the upcoming launch, the university will also accelerate its current recruitment drive to attract 50 faculty members and 900 students from across the world.
Speaking on the launch of ASE’s new campus, Professor Leonard Wantchekon, Founder and President at ASE, “Since launching 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 vital we selected an environment which strongly reflected our ethos. At ASE, we firmly believe it is simply not enough to train up STEM talent, but we must also create an enabling policy environment which empowers their ideas to truly scale.”
“Through its Silicon Zanzibar initiative, Zanzibar has made impressive headway in this regard by establishing policies which heavily encourage frontier innovation. Coupled with its strong entrepreneurial spirit and close proximity to a number of well-regarded East African universities, we’re fully convinced these qualities make Zanzibar the ideal destination 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, and the Pomeroy and Betty Perry Smith Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University.
Launched in Benin in 2014, ASE was founded to address the challenges of a lack of African representation at the forefront of cutting-edge research as well as limited training of top-tier talent on the continent. It has over 2,000 students and alumni, 12+ degree programs and four campuses across its locations of Benin, Côte D’Ivoire, Nigeria and Zanzibar.
For the past 7 years, over 15% of ASE graduates have been placed in top global PhD programs at institutions including Princeton, Harvard University, Penn State University and the University of Wisconsin.
Honourable Minister Lela Mussa, The Minister of Education for Zanzibar, “Zanzibar is pursuing education transformation to achieve its national development vision. We are promoting international universities and higher learning institutions to establish campuses here in the isles to support human capital development.”