Authors: Markus Grasmair (NTNU), Zerihun Kinfe Birhanu (Hawassa Univeristy) and Anne Kværnø (NTNU)
The collaboration between Hawassa University in Ethiopia (HU) and NTNU goes back to around 2008, when Professor Henning Omre from NTNU and Professor Ayele Taye from HU initiated joint efforts to establish an MSc Programme in Mathematical and Statistical Modelling at HU after the model of the study programme in Industrial Mathematics at NTNU. This initiative was supported by Norad, the Norwegian Agency for Development cooperation, through a first project running from 2008-2013. In 2010, the first cohort of 20 students were enrolled in this program, and by now more than 100 students have graduated. As a continuation of this master programme, a PhD programme in Mathematical and Statistical Sciences was established at HU, again with funding by Norad under their NORHED programme (2013-2019).
In 2021, we secured the next follow-up project – the Ethiopian–Norwegian Network in Computational Mathematics (ENNCoMat) – running from 2022-2026 and funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir). While the previous activities of NTNU were mostly focused on Hawassa, we decided to increase the scope of the collaboration by including two additional universities, namely Arba Minch University (AMU) and Adama Science and Technology University (ASTU). In addition, ECMI is included as one of the main partners in this project.
The ENNCoMat project focuses on student exchange and joint supervision on MSc and PhD level, as well as a set of joint activities in Ethiopia. Ethiopian MSc students are awarded grants for a one-year exchange stay at NTNU, where they follow the same courses as the students in the local Industrial Mathematics programme. In addition, they gain modeling experience by attending the ECMI modelling week at the end of their stay. The first group of three MSc students have sucessfully completed their stay in 2023 and have returned to Ethiopia, where they wrote their MSc thesis under joint supervision of an Ethiopian and a Norwegian supervisor; a second group is currently studying at NTNU. In addition, four Ethiopian PhD students are working together with Norwegian staff members on their PhD projects. Two of these students have attended a previous Study Group with Industry in Denmark; the other two will join the upcoming Study Group with Industry in Trondheim. Originally, we had also planned reciprocal stays by Norwegian students at the Ethiopian partner universities, but these stays had to be cancelled because of the unsure security situation in Ethiopia with travel restrictions for large parts of the country.
In Ethiopia, we have organised the first Ethiopian Study Group with Industry together with a preporatory winter school in December 2023 at the Addis Ababa Science and Technology University (AASTU) with participants from Ethiopia, Norway, and Germany. A second ESGI and winter school is planned for December 2025. Moreover, we have organised three two-week intensive courses in scientific programming for female BSc and MSc students at Hawassa, Arba Minch, and Adama, and a modelling week in Addis Ababa following the model of the ECMI modelling week. In addition to the main partners of the project, we were supported in these activities by Addis Ababa University, AASTU, Lund University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
