Initiative Afrique - Samuel Agyekum

Initiative Afrique Podcast

Samuel Agyekumis is a PhD student at the Institute of Geography, University of Bern. He holds an MSc in Urban Environmental Management (Land Use Planning) from the Wageningen University and Research (The Netherlands). He arrived in Bern one year and a half ago after pursuing his bachelor's at Copenhagen as an Erasmus student and an MSc in The Netherlands. He was born in Kumasi, one of the largest cities in Ghana, and one of the few anglophone countries in the region. He feels that as an African scientist at the University of Bern, he has an epistemic responsibility to transmit true claims about his domain of research between Africa and Europe while at the same time, he has a social responsibility to align his research towards “desirable” ends and democratically held values. He reminds us of a Ghanaian proverb about promoting exchanges among UniBe and African institutions: “The path paver is always not aware that his back is crooked”, so you often need people by your side or behind you to steer collaborative processes. Inviting scholars from Africa to share their knowledge about how things work in their countries is one of the steps to achieving this collaboration. He thinks that Initiative Afrique is a good starting point as a platform where African researchers can discuss about common issues, always keeping in mind that “we should not be in a bubble”.

Members of the Initiative Afrique community at the University of Bern (Switzerland) introduce themselves in a series of podcasts.