The University of Ngaoundéré

The University of Ngaoundéré was opened in 1992. From 1993 has there been given courses in humanities and social sciences. The university has grown enormously these ten years. In 1992 where there 400 students, in 1996 was there 3000, in 1998 had the number of students passed 6000 and in 2002 were there more than 7500. Few of these students come from Ngaoundéré and the region around the town, which is due to the low degree of literacy and low interest of formal knowledge in the population.
Many students come from the South because Ngaoundéré is seen as a safer place than the big cities in the South, but also because the university has a good reputation. Another huge category of
students comes from the Far North Province, where the rate of literacy is much higher than in the south. Over the last years have the University of Ngaoundéré recruited a lot of students from the neighboring country Chad, which only have a University with
very limited capacity.

The University is placed 16 kilometers from the city centre, out on the savannah. There is a small town of houses for rent and restaurants growing up just outside the campus. This gives the University a sense of a world for it self. And it is a very heterogeneous world, where young people from all over the Central Africa meet to learn and to discuss on current political issue. The university is one of few arenas in the region where these kind of informed inter ethnic and inter religious debates is continuously going on. This makes the university of Ngaoundéré a very important institution for this region, which has a fragile political situation.


ANTHROPOS


The Ngaoundéré Anthropos Programme is financed by NUFU, the Norwegian Council for Higher Education’s Programme for Development Research and Education. It is a pioneering effort between two peripheral universities, the University of Ngaoundéré and the University of Tromsø to enhance the specificities of their research and teaching competence in order to offer indigenous based knowledge to the international academic community

The specificities are due to the importance given to the intelligibility of the knowledge in local contexts

The Ngaoundéré Anthropos programme has run since 1992, and is now in its third phase of NUFU financing, based on the perspectives of ‘the crossing views’

Anthropos serves as the ideological and organisational umbrella for the Fredskorps Project.