Previous projects

The departments in the consortium have collaborated in various areas, including developing a standard curriculum with a coursework component at the PhD level (2015–2017), conducting joint curriculum reviews at the MSc level (e.g., the February 2016 Arusha regional review of MSc programmes that included all six universities in the consortium), jointly utilising available human resources for research, teaching, and supervision, arranging joint summer schools for graduate students from the region and other African countries (one every year since 2004), organising conferences (UoN 2005, Arusha 2012, Mak 2016, and the Joint Africa–Nordic Conference at Mak 2023), and workshops, and jointly applying for external funding. With support from the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), benchmarks for mathematics programmes at BSc, MSc, and PhD levels in the East African Community were developed in 2018–2019.

Some departments have collaborated with Finnish universities, namely Lappeenranta–Lahti University of Technology (LUT), Tampere University, and Oulu University, through the Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) and the Higher Education Institutions Institutional Cooperation Instrument (HEI-ICI) of the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2007 to 2014.

The CIMO project started at UDSM with LUT as the coordinator in Finland. The main objective of this project was to facilitate short-term visits for Master’s students to Finnish universities. The project also included curriculum development and Modelling Weeks. It later expanded to include other universities in the Eastern Africa region, such as University of Bahir Dar (Ethiopia), the Institute of Basic Sciences and Technology (Kenya), the former National University of Rwanda, the former Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (Rwanda), Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology (Tanzania), Makerere University, and Busitema University (Uganda).

The main objective of the HEI-ICI project, also coordinated by LUT, was to improve the curricula of the programmes in the member departments to promote applications-oriented mathematics education, emphasising innovations and working-life relevance in Eastern Africa, a key focus area on the proposed Cluster of Research Excellence.

Another Finnish project was Working life interaction in modelling and data skills (WOLIMODS, 2022–2024), funded by the Finnish National Agency for Education. The topics in this project were Problem-based approaches and mobility in PhD training. There are three partners in Africa (UDSM, NM-AIST, and UR) and three from Finland (LUT, Tampere University, and Jyväskylä University).

One of the key objectives of the LUT-Africa collaboration has been to facilitate industry outreach and apply theoretical knowledge to real-world challenges through problem-solving workshops. Between 2007 and 2022, four Modelling Weeks were organised, with the first Study Group workshop taking place in 2022. During a Modelling Week, MSc-level students work in teams (typically of five), guided by a team instructor over a week. In a Study Group workshop, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers tackle real R&D problems from industry or societal contexts. These models are adaptations of well-established formats and are integral to the Europe-Africa knowledge transfer initiative.

Collaboration between universities in the region and University of Oslo began in the early 1990s, resulting in the establishment of The Southern African Masters Programme in Mathematical Modelling. Hosted by University of Zimbabwe and funded by The Norwegian Programme for Development, Research, and Education (NUFU), the programme ran from 1996 to 2007. During this period, it successfully graduated 60 students from Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, along with 10 PhD students who completed their degrees through this collaborative effort.

This collaboration continued from 2008 to 2014 under The Norwegian Programme for Master’s Studies (NOMA), funded by The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). Based at UDSM with technical support from University of Oslo, the programme trained 155 students from the region in Mathematical Modelling. For more details about this collaboration, refer to Bernt Øksendal’s presentation titled The role of Norway’s programs in the development of mathematics in Southern Africa at the 2014 conference Mathematics in Emerging Nations: Achievement and Opportunities (MENAO).