Growing up poor in Pretoria, South Africa, Lesego Ellis Makhubela watched with frustration as foreign aid flowed into his Continent. His fellow Africans didn’t need a handout, he believed, but rather higher education to help advance their economies. “What Africa needs,” Mr. Makhubela, 22, says, “is skills.”
So when he spotted a notice at a library operated by the U.S. Embassy there about a new State Department scholarship programme to provide foreign students practical training at American community colleges, he leapt at the chance. He won one of the awards and spent the 2007-8 academic year studying computer science at Parkland College, in Champaign, Ill.
Educational exchanges and Fellowships are not new, of course; the best known, the Fulbright Program, is more than 60 years old. But the Community College Summit Initiative Program, as this fledgling effort is known, reflects a growing recognition among American government officials that the US must do a better job in its public-diplomacy outreach to those who are not members of their countries’ socioeconomic elite. Continue reading here
Comment : The CCID is definitively great program that enables individuals, from historically undeserved populations and who may not have had opportunities for formal job training or higher education, to spend one year studying at community colleges in the United States and earn a vocational certificate. Participants are recruited in Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkey, and selected countries in Central America. Read about the program here