In their report Building Stronger Universities, 2009, Danish Universities recommended the establishment of Networks of Excellence in order to strengthen the research capacity of developing countries, especially in Africa. Danida’s research funds similarly favor research capacity development in select African countries and Nepal. Building networks through development assistance is not a new endeavor, but is based on relations built between Danish and African researchers over decades through the Danida Fellowship program and its predecessors.
Engaging a multidisciplinary approach, our planned workshop proposes to combine historians’ studies on existing networks created over the past six decades through various fellowship and scholarship programs, with the studies of scholars from other disciplines, which focus on the expectations and future of the Networks of Excellence and similar initiatives launched by the USA, Japan, China, India, and Germany. We seek to contribute to the understanding of how development assistance continues to play a key role in engendering networks spanning globally. Studies of different countries’ and other agents’ involvement in network building provide different perspectives on degrees of formality, conscious effort, and explicit or implicit interests in a given network.

The workshop in December 2010 will have two key objectives: 1) to sketch some of the existing research and identifying lacunae for further research to be carried out through a common research project, and 2) to outline a research strategy and identify a common interest for a future application for funding at the EU level.
A by-product of the workshop will be the preliminary preparation of a panel for the Joint Nordic Conference on Development to be held in Copenhagen in November of 2011.