MARGEE ENSIGN recounts the challenge of leading a university in an impoverished community
I have had the challenge and privilege of leading universities on three continents: Africa, North America, and, most recently, Europe, at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG). But I will never forget in a hurry my experiences at the American University of Nigeria, Yola.
The AUN, where I was president from 2010 to 2017 and then again from 2021 to 2022, is explicit about its mission to be “Africa’s development university” and to ensure that the local community and region, much of which is impoverished, benefit from university programs and projects.
At AUN, the mission necessarily drove how we developed curricula, recruited students and faculty, and explained ourselves not only to students and parents but to our skeptical and sometimes hostile host societies, which were unclear about and at times suspicious of the purpose of an American education. At AUN, for several years, our very survival depended on believing in, telling, and living a coherent and compelling story. As we were threatened by Boko Haram, a violent Islamist insurgent group whose Hausa name translates loosely as “Western education is evil,” the mutually supportive and trusting relationship we developed with our local community kept us safe and allowed us to live our development mission.
AUN was only six years old when I became president there. Situated in rural, desperately impoverished, largely Muslim northeastern Nigeria, AUN might not have survived financially or physically if we hadn’t put a community network in place before our crisis began. (We also took the precaution of hiring and training our own armed security force of more than six hundred people.)
In 2012, the Nigerian government removed the fuel subsidies it had been providing citizens. Nationwide strikes broke out. In response, AUN spearheaded the creation of the Adamawa Peace Initiative (API), bringing together local Muslim and Christian leaders, businesspeople, and youth leaders for the first time. We agreed on a set of values and goals that guided our work for five years.
Youth must be positively engaged.
Religion is an instrument of peace.
Women are the center of development.
Education is the foundation of society.
We agreed that these community leaders best understood the needs of our poor community. Then, based on their concerns, we agreed that our first project would focus on the most vulnerable youth. Through the creation of our Feed and Read program, we worked to reduce hunger and increase literacy among children on the street (the Almajiri), who were easily recruited by Boko Haram, which was taking advantage of the national upheaval to become more powerful. We hired local women to cook a daily meal, and our students taught the children literacy and numeracy.
We also established the Peace through Sports program, which brought together youth from different cultural and religious backgrounds to play football. Most participants were identified by API members. Our Technology-Enhanced Learning for All (TELA) initiative helped teach more than twenty thousand internally displaced children how to read via our radio program. The curriculum for the radio program was developed in an AUN media class. In fact, all these efforts were fully integrated into newly established community-based university development courses, in which students, faculty, and sometimes staff identified a local problem — hunger, illiteracy, environmental degradation, poverty — and faculty then developed a curriculum focused on proposed solutions.
Additionally, our API members told us that local hospitals had unreliable internet service and that health care providers needed access to research on emerging diseases. In response, AUN started the Library on a Flash (Drive) program, through which our librarians uploaded the desired articles and books onto flash drives and then sent them out to hospitals and clinics in the region.
The American University of Nigeria granted scholarships to twenty-one young women who escaped Boko Haram militants.
Thus, even before Boko Haram intensified its rampage of terrorizing regional communities with bombings and kidnappings, we had developed strong and trusting relationships with local leaders. They were the ones to alert us about the intensifying threat of Boko Haram not far from us.
I will never forget the call in fall 2014 from the emir of Mubi, a city to the north of us: “Margee, can you please come and bring the API members with you?”
We all drove together in a bus, and when we arrived, we found a room full of about five hundred women and girls. I asked our translator, “Where are the boys and men?”
One of the women said, “Boko Haram killed our husbands and kidnapped our boys.”
This situation served as an early warning that allowed us to get ready for what was coming. In the bus on the way home, Imam Dauda Bello, a prominent member of API, said to me: “We must be obsessed with peace,” and we were, for years.
When later in 2014 close to 300,000 refugees poured into our small city to flee Boko Haram’s escalating destruction of mass bombings and kidnappings, we had strong relationships to draw upon and an institutional structure to help us feed and house the refugees. When a local university north of us was destroyed, we opened our classrooms and residence halls to its students so that they could successfully conclude their school year.
At all the universities I have led — but especially in Nigeria — every department developed and embedded in the curriculum a community-based project. These included courses in entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship taught mainly to women in Yola and courses in sustainable agriculture that taught basic principles and practices to farmers. In addition, every afternoon after classes were completed, AUN students, faculty, and staff participated in what we called the “feeding,” during which we distributed food to approximately fifty thousand people per day.
Even today, very far away from Yola in northern Nigeria, I remember with nostalgia something one of my Nigerian students from the town of Chibok told me. After rescuing her from her Boko Haram kidnappers, we brought her to the American University of Nigeria. Upon graduation, she said words that I carry with me every day: “Education gives me the wings to fly, the power to fight, and the voice to speak.”
Ensign, a former President at American University of Nigeria, Yola, is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, USA.
