Elisabeth Wamuchiru on Urban Informality, Research Impact, and Mentorship

Today we're listening to Dr. Wamuchiru, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and an urban and regional planner.In this episode, Dr. Wamuchiru tells us how to prevent research papers from accumulating dust and being left for referee points, why informality is a key research topic for the future, how to deal with classes with Kenyan undergraduates fresh from high school, why young people should still become academics and more.

In this episode of Africa Knows, we speak with Dr. Musyimi Mbathi, Senior Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Nairobi.Drawing on over 20 years of experience across academia, government and the United Nations, Dr. Mbathi reflects on what it means to train the next generation of urban planners.He discusses the importance of exposing students to real-world urban complexities, grounding research in society’s needs, and embracing participatory approaches to planning.From informality and resilience to governance and economic development, this conversation explores why the future is urban, and why African cities need planners who are ready for it.

In this episode, Gaddafi is in Kano, Nigeria, speaking to Ibrahim Ado Kurawa, a prominent northern Nigerian writer, historian and Islamic scholar.Their conversation is about history, knowledge and power in northern Nigeria. And it gives us a glimpse of the rich tradition of scholarship and education in Islamic West Africa, what Kurawa calls the Sudanic tradition, and its interactions with colonialism and more recently, the wider liberalization of knowledge. Kurawa gives us a sense of what the older systems of Islamic learning in Kano were like, in a way, how he experienced them when he was a young man.He sketches out how they are changing and what may be lost as scholarship moves away from the deeply immersive forms of traditional learning to a faster, more fragmented and more instrumental system of modern education.But the conversation also turns to why young Nigerians should know their history, how northern Nigeria continues to struggle educationally, why skills training alone cannot solve unemployment, and how the role of traditional leaders in governance has changed under the democratic Nigerian state

Charity is talking to Alice Menya.And Alice Menya is the Urban Program Coordinator at Nuvoni center, which is an independent research organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, that works together closely with local universities, but also international ones, including in the Netherlands.Alice is currently a doctoral candidate at the Ardhi University in Dar es Salaam, focusing on planning and governance of resilient cities in East Africa.She gives us insight into a joint master's program that she's a part of, which brings together Kenyan and Dutch students and explains a lot of the intricacies of what makes it so rewarding, but also difficult to set up internationally collaborative education.But she also explores interesting and exciting new research approaches, including researching children as a demographic and analyzing people's diaries.

In this episode you'll hear Paul Gadi, who is a faculty member in the Department of Business Administration and Management at Plateau State Polytechnic in Barkin Ladi, Nigeria.This week is about polytechnics, which sits at the intersection between vocational and academic education and could play a key role in upskilling Nigeria's working population. Dr. Gadi tells us about the bad and the good of these important institutions and shares what he would do if he were rector at the Plapoly, the consequences of Nigerian academia becoming a family affair, and the differences between Malaysian and Nigerian academia

Hajiya Halima Ben Umar is a Nigerian public intellectual and the Executive Director at Women in Media Communication Initiative. She is based in Kano, northern Nigeria, where she also co-anchors the popular TV programme Mata A Yau, Women Today in Hausa, that you will also hear discussed in the conversation. Ben Umar speaks with Gaddafi about fighting for the rights of women in Islam while being a working mother of seven; her tensions and collaborations with Islamic scholars; her Islamically-inspired engagement with a range of social problems such as drug use, mental health, and teenage pregnancies; and the importance of educating young girls - and what happens if a society fails to do so.

In this episode, Henry speaks with Dr Julie Sanda, a political scientist and the director general of the Plateau Peace Building Agency in Jos. In a very open and frank conversation, they explore the ethics of international partnerships, the impact of the difficulties of life on Nigerian academics, the importance of storytelling in science, being a “pocket psychologist”, and what the Nigerian academy looks like when it is intellectually vibrant and exciting.

This week, you will hear Dr Nzioka John Muthama, a professor at the University of Nairobi. Dr Muthama is an applied meteorologist with an interest in climate change and sustainability, and long experience teaching university students from the BA to the PhD.In this episode, he talks to Charity about the drastic changes in the University of Nairobi’s teaching methods after COVID, the impacts of his research on the ozone layer and climate change, the four questions of methodology, and writing a thesis that everybody wants to read.

In this episode, Gaddafi is speaking to Ibrahim Sani Kankara, an associate professor and pioneer head of the department of anthropology, faculty of history and development studies at Bayero University Kano, northern Nigeria. In this conversation, Dr Kankara talks about historians always being afraid of numbers, teaching students to mould their character, the importance of collaboration when researching conflict, and more.

This week, we get to hear Dr Abdourahmane Idrissa, a Nigerien philosopher and political scientist based in Leiden but who has worked and lived all around the world. Idrissa’s areas of research expertise include the state, Islam, democracy, and security in the Sahel and West Africa more broadly.In this episode, he speaks with Henry and Gaddafi a truly wide range of subjects, from the impact of 9/11 on his academic path to the birth and death of the Songhai empire, and from the intellectual prophets of the 1960s to West African social structure - and, of course, the security crises in the Sahel.