The African School of Economic(ASE) has officially announced its expansion to Zanzibar to mark the university’s first location in East Africa, with plans for a state-of-the-art campus for African students and world-class faculty.
ASE will also become the latest high-profile addition to the Silicon Zanzibar initiative as it kickstarts the next phase of its expansion plan to become the go-to Pan-African centre of higher learning.
To support the upcoming launch, the university will also accelerate its current recruitment drive to attract 50 elite faculty members and 900 students from across the world, providing the highest standard of learning to ensure African students can compete on a global stage.
“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,” said Professor Leonard Wantchekon, founder and president at ASE.
“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.”
Launched in Benin in 2014, ASE was founded to address the twin 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.
With over 2,000 students and alumni, 12+ degree programs and four campuses across its locations of Benin, Côte D’Ivoire, Nigeria and Zanzibar, it ranks as one of Africa’s leading universities in terms of research quality, the calibre of faculty and students as well as its superb record of graduate placements.
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. 75% 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.
Lela Mussa, the Minister of Education for Zanzibar welcomed the new addition to the country’s education system.
“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.”
Daniel Yu, the founder and CEO of Wasoko, Africa’s largest B2B e-commerce network and the official private sector ambassador for Silicon Zanzibar said “ASE’s presence in Zanzibar will undoubtedly have a transformative impact in 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.”
