Provided

Parfait M. Eloundou-Enyegue, left, associate professor of development sociology, consults with graduate student Sarah Giroux. Both are working in French-speaking Africa to help students pursue higher education in population science so they can help their countries forge effective policies.

You can't improve quality of life in sub-Saharan Africa without effective policies. And you can't develop effective policies without a good handle on a population's demographics, says Parfait M. Eloundou-Enyegue, Cornell associate professor of development sociology.

To improve African students' training in population science, Eloundou-Enyegue and colleagues at Cornell are using a $300,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to build research capacity in Francophone Africa.

The support gives Cornell an opportunity to work with the Institute for Demographic Training and Research (IFORD), a leading institute for demographic training in French-speaking Africa, with hopes of fortifying population science programs in Africa to reduce their dependence on professionals from other countries and to inform development and policy programs.

IFORD is based in Cameroon but has historically trained students from all French-speaking countries of sub-Saharan Africa -- roughly half the countries in this region. The project is recruiting faculty and graduate students to teach summer courses at IFORD. For example, this past summer, Vongai Kandiwa and Sarah Giroux, graduate students in development sociology, taught a short course on research methods, and Francoise Vermeylen, statistical consultant at Cornell, taught a course in advanced statistics.

One problem with students in Francophone Africa, says Eloundou-Enyegue, stems from language barriers with U.S. institutions. That barrier interferes with scholars fully benefiting from the U.S. expertise in the area of demographics.

Another reason why the project focuses on Francophone Africa is because "this is a sub-region that is now going through rapid and complex demographic changes that are expected to have implications for socio-economic development and inequality," says Eloundou-Enyegue, a native of Cameroon who has been studying demographics in the region throughout his eight years at Cornell. "So if you go from the standpoint of the intensity of these issues, this is one important place to be."

The point, he adds, is to train African scholars from the participating 26 countries to have the tools to deal with these research problems, to track these changes over time and to look at different policy interventions.

"Some of the most promising students in this project could be encouraged to apply to graduate school, maybe in the United States or Canada," adds Giroux.

In addition to teaching a short course, Giroux spent this past summer supervising students in Cameroon on their master's projects. She also got a chance to begin work on another grant, which involves reinterviewing nearly 5,000 families to glean information about schooling and employment.

On a personal side, Giroux says that the summer was an opportunity for discovery and dispelling some enduring stereotypes about African cities. "Most of the time when I was traveling through the city, what I saw over and over was not just the poverty, but the inequality," she says.

"I think that this kind of opportunity for international work is what drove me to stay at Cornell," says Giroux '03, M.S. '06. "This experience exemplifies that Cornell has so many opportunities in so many different places."

In the near future, the team hopes to build on this project to create opportunities for structured international research for undergraduates at Cornell as well.

Brandon Chiazza '09 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.