URI president visits Ghana to strengthen ties with Ghanaian universities

UNIVERSITY OF Rhode Island President David M. Dooley is shown sitting in a fishing canoe in Ghana with students who will attend graduate school at the university in the fall. / COURTESY PATRICIA MENSAH
UNIVERSITY OF Rhode Island President David M. Dooley is shown sitting in a fishing canoe in Ghana with students who will attend graduate school at the university in the fall. / COURTESY PATRICIA MENSAH

SOUTH KINGSTOWN – University of Rhode Island President David M. Dooley completed a week-long trip to Ghana to strengthen ties and discuss future collaborations, including student exchange programs, with the University of Cape Coast and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

The University of Cape Coast is 95 miles southwest of the Ghanaian capital, Accra, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, whereas Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology is just over 150 miles northwest of the capital in the city of Kumasi.

This week-long visit stemmed from a sustainable fisheries program led by the Coastal Resources Center, part of URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography. The Narragansett campus-based Coastal Resources Center is leading a five-year $24 million United States Agency for International Development Ghana Sustainable Fisheries Management project with the University. This is the largest USAID grant ever awarded to URI.

While in Ghana, Dooley gave a lecture on globalization, visiting local fisheries and touring a river in the west of the country.

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During that lecture, Dooley emphasized his goal as president of URI to increase the university’s international and global perspective.

“With these global challenges also come global opportunities. We need to focus more on the opportunities. We are no longer insulated by borders and oceans as we once were, but in all of this, there are global opportunities and demand for higher education,” he said.

Dooley added that the complexity of the modern world includes great challenges like climate change – beyond one single nation’s ability to solve alone.

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