Ford Foundation Gives $330-Million to Educate Leaders in Developing Countries

By STEPHEN G. GREENE

The Ford Foundation has announced that it plans to spend $330-million to help educate and train thousands of future leaders from developing countries.

The new International Fellows Program will enable people from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia to pursue graduate education at universities anywhere in the world. Over the next decade, about 350 fellows will be selected each year and given support for up to three years of study in any field related to Ford’s mission, which includes strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, and promoting international cooperation.

Fellows will be drawn from groups of people who traditionally have had difficulty gaining admission to graduate-education programs, including women; ethnic, racial, or religious minorities; and people who live outside capital cities or in countries that are or have recently been engaged in armed conflicts.

“Our belief is that there is an enormous amount of talent in these unreached communities,” says Ford’s president, Susan V. Berresford. “This is an investment in people; it’s a very nice complement to our more normal work of investing in organizations.”

Ford will spend $280-million on some 3,500 fellowships over the next decade. An additional $50-million will go toward improving opportunities for undergraduate and secondary education in the countries from which its fellows are chosen.

Although the new program represents a major commitment for Ford, it will not reduce the foundation’s grant making in other areas, which last year totaled nearly $700-million. Like many foundations, Ford has seen its assets rise substantially in the past few years with the growth of the stock market: Its endowment is now worth about $14.5-billion, compared with $7.5-billion in 1995.

The $280-million grant — the largest in Ford’s history — is going to a charity the foundation has created to run the fellows program. The expenditure will increase Ford’s payout this year to about 7 percent of its assets. Federal law requires private foundations to spend at least 5 percent of their assets each year, on average, and Ford typically spends about 5.5 percent.

“It was very important in our board’s consideration of this very large investment that we’re making, drawing on assets we’ve gained in the new economy, that we give something back to the people and the countries that haven’t benefited as much as we have in this country,” Ms. Berresford says, in explaining why the foundation decided on the new fellows program.

While Ford has a long history of supporting fellowships for foreign students, its new program differs in significant ways from previous ones. A small secretariat at the foundation’s New York headquarters will coordinate the program, but the process of selecting fellows and monitoring their progress will be carried out by collaborating institutions in the various regions overseas.

Ford also plans to encourage program participants to share their expertise with one another, both within each region and around the world, in a conscious effort to develop a cohort of global leaders who stay linked with one another after their studies end.

To facilitate communication between them, each fellow will receive a laptop computer upon admission to the program, and can also request training in computer, research, or language skills, for example, before embarking on his or her selected course of study.

Ford will not prescribe where or what its fellows should study but will help place them in whatever institutions they think will best meet their needs. The Institute of International Education, based in New York, will help run the program and evaluate its performance.

“Most fellowship programs of this magnitude are government programs, which typically require that a student study in the host country,” notes Joan Dassin, the program’s director. “We’re saying, You don’t need to know English — you don’t even need to come to the United States.”

In an effort to ensure that fellows continue to work in their own countries rather than emigrating to highly paid jobs in developed countries, Ford is providing modest support for projects they pursue after they earn their advanced degrees. What’s more, the selection process seeks to identify people who are strongly committed to improving their own countries and regions — and therefore less likely to be lured away.

Fellows are likely in years to come to occupy jobs in business, government, journalism, higher education — virtually every area of social endeavor. In that sense, the program differs from other programs Ford supports that focus on training nonprofit activists.

“The kinds of analytical skills and practical skills you could get in a master’s in public-policy program in a U.S. curriculum equips people to do the calculus they need to make policy decisions,” Ms. Dassin says. “We felt the benefits of a long-term degree program would be important.”

Applications are now being accepted for pilot programs in Chile, Ghana, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Senegal, and Vietnam; the first round of fellows will be named next spring. Other regions will gradually be added until the program is fully operational in all regions by 2002.

More information is available at the Ford Foundation’s Web site: http://www.fordfound.org.