Economic and social development expert is honored for her many efforts

By Christopher Greaves '01

They say you reap what you sow, and N'Dri Assié-Lumumba's studies on African education and gender equity have recently earned her a harvest of recognition.

N'dri Assié-Lumumba, associate professor of Africana studies and education, was one of 27 women nominated for special recognition during a ceremony for International Women's Day, March 8, at the Big Red Barn graduate center. Robert Barker/University Photography

A Cornell associate professor of Africana studies and education, Assié-Lumumba has received several notable honors in the past four months. At the dawn of the new year, the expert in socio-economic development was appointed to serve a three-year term on the United Nations Committee for Development Policy (CDP), which is composed of 24 independent experts in the fields of economic development, social development and environmental protection nominated by the U.N. secretary-general. On March 8, she earned special recognition at Cornell's International Women's Day celebration, sponsored by the International Students and Scholars Office and the Women's Resource Center. And the following week, on March 16, she was honored with the Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on African Descendants from the Comparative and International Education Society for her article, "Educational and Economic Reforms, Gender Equity, and Access to Schooling in Africa," which was published in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology last year. And most recently, she was awarded the Foreign Expert in Education and Development fellowship from the Center for the Study of International Cooperation in Education (CICE) at Hiroshima University in Japan.

Assié-Lumumba's work covers a wide range of topics, including equity and education, education finance, innovations in education, higher education and the education of women and girls in Africa. Her research highlights and attempts to address some of the problems inherent in African education, principally tackling issues like the lack of female access to schooling and the biased, Eurocentric worldview that predominates in African school systems.

"Indigenous knowledge systems have been systematically under attack since the trans-Atlantic enslavement and particularly during colonization," said Assié-Lumumba, a Côte d'Ivoire native. "The European colonization of Africa challenged traditional African institutions, socialization processes and the cultural underpinnings of nearly everything in its attempt to restructure the African vision of the world."

African families resisted this corruptive influence, Assié-Lumumba said, by shielding their children, particularly their daughters, the traditional purveyors of culture, from European education. "Families protected their daughters from European education because it educated them to think differently, to speak a language their parents couldn't understand and to learn skills they could not use in the community," she said. "Given the central role women played in the reproduction of [African] culture and education, it [European education] would have been the end of us as a people."

In spite of these noxious effects, formal education has become the main mode of social promotion in Africa. African women, also faced with major contemporary constraints, are hence left to grapple with a severe disadvantage. Assié-Lumumba is concerned with mainstreaming these women and reforming African systems to reflect African cultures and ideologies. "There's no point in bringing women to the mainstream if the mainstream has many problems," she noted.

Prominent African philosophers and educators have articulated this need to rethink and reappropriate education in Africa for social progress in African Voices in Education (Juta, 2000), a book that Assié-Lumumba and three colleagues at the University of South Africa in Pretoria edited.

She currently is working on a book on educational innovations in Africa and is contributing to specific areas in which the United Nations is assisting Africa in the continent's effort to achieve sustainable development.

Assié-Lumumba received a master's degrees in history in 1974 and in sociology in 1975, both from Université Lyon II in France, and her Ph.D. in economics and sociology of education from the University of Chicago in 1982. Prior to coming to Cornell, she held teaching, research and academic administrative positions at other institutions in the United States, France and in several African countries.

She is co-founder and deputy director in charge of the gender program of CEPARRED (Pan-African Studies and Research Center in International Relations and Education for Development), with its headquarters in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire; an associate researcher at Université de Cocody in Abidjan; and a research affiliate of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston. She is editor of the Journal of Comparative Education and International Relations in Africa, published by CEPARRED, and serves on the advisory board of the South African Journal of Higher Education and the Journal of Asian and African Studies.

While at Cornell, she served as the director of the university's program on Gender and Global Change, 1996-97, and she served as regional adviser on the Advancement of Women in Africa to the African Center for Women at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, specifically in preparation for the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China.

Assié-Lumumba said she delights in the opportunity Cornell has given her to make practical use of her theories taught in the classroom and articulated in her scholarly works. She enjoys teaching and appreciates working with students on campus, where since 1992 she has been serving as a faculty fellow and now a faculty in residence.

"However, as a social scientist, if I stayed only here in Ithaca, I would not be able to continue to significantly make my contribution to the world beyond the campus," she said. "Cornell welcomes the ability of the scholars to also use their knowledge and theoretical and conceptual work in real-world applications.

"Theoretical work and policy analysis must be used for understanding social phenomena in order to change them," Assié-Lumumba concluded.