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New “Centre of African Excellence” to be established

Exterior view of the KLU building

Kühne Logistics University (KLU) in Hamburg, in collaboration with the Kühne Foundation (KF) in Switzerland secured a funding of 2.2 million EUR over five years from the DAAD to form an African Center of Excellence for Sustainable Operations for Ressource Management and Food Supply (SCO). The Center will jointly be established together with the University of Nairobi (UoN) in Kenya and the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in Tanzania.

Transdisciplinary Centre

Logo of DAAD
The new African Center of Excellence SCO is funded by DAAD.

The highly transdisciplinary Center will empower sustainable operations related to production, movement, and processing of food and other natural resources as well the people needed along the supply chain. It addresses practitioners, students and graduates of business schools just the same as those of other disciplines, like medicine, agriculture, engineering, and humanitarian. The proposed Center harnesses previous and ongoing funding of the Kühne Foundation which has helped establish Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degree pro­grams in business with a specialization in logistics and operations management at seven different universities in Africa, among them the University of Nairobi and the University of Dar es Salaam.

KLU’s Dean of Research, Prof. Maria Besiou, will serve as Principal Investigator. Kühne Foundation`s Logistics Education – Emerging & Developing Countries (LEED) - team under the leadership of Dr. Andre Kreie will support with the operational implementation of the Center in Africa.

Centres of African Excellence

Since 2008, the DAAD has been supporting universities in several (now nine) African countries by establishing centres of excellence to improve the quality of their education and expand their research capacities. Intended to train future decision-makers in keeping with international standards, ten centres have since been created, each of which is supported by a German university – and with the newly announced centres, that number will soon grow to twelve.

The second new addition, the “Promoting Academic Capacities for Sustainable Agricultural Resources Use in West Africa (Pro-RUWA) Centre,” will be supported by the University of Kassel.

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