Naples/Uganda education collaboration
Gulunap is an educational-scientific collaboration between the University of Naples “Federico II”, in Italy, and the University of Gulu, in Northern-Uganda.
Northern Uganda has major problems with food, health and education, having been devastated by a twenty-year long insurgence by the Lord’s Resistance Army: with over 100,000 people dead, 20,000 children abducted, and 1,200,000 Ugandan citizens left in internally displaced person camps. The Gulunap project focuses on the long-term sharing of knowledge between these two, highly diverse, socio-cultural contexts.
The 2012 Antonio Feltrinelli prize was awarded to the Gulunap project by the Accademia dei Lincei, which it considers “an exceptional project of high moral and humanitarian value”.
As its first – and largest – initiative Gulunap set up a faculty of medicine from scratch, in 2004. The school – housed in classrooms and laboratories built by the project – supports a five-year curriculum, covering first treatments; disease prevention; maternal and infant health; and tropical medicine, and includes a one-year internship.
Since 2010, 164 medical doctors have graduated from the faculty – with most now working in Uganda – and over 40 professors from Naples having taught at Gulu. In addition, didactic materials have been made freely available on the Internet, and the school has launched both a medical students association and a medical journal.
In 2005, the Gulunap-Science project was started. This scheme aimed to train secondary school teachers in science education, covering such activities as , covering such activities as discussing results and proposals from physics and science educational research; designing and implementing new courses; starting/organising laboratories, focusing on easily-reproducible experiments based on low-cost local materials; and educating young university staff. Special attention was given to the use of experiments.
Biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics teachers were involved in the project; with over ten Naples professors. For in-service physics teachers, two one-week full-immersion Northern Uganda Teachers of Science [NUTS] workshops were undertaken, in 2006 and 2010.
Gulunap-Agriculture was launched in 2008, with the objectives of: reducing food insecurity and malnutrition; developing agro-forest research, focusing on the sustainable use of natural resources to minimise environmental impact; developing post-harvest technology; help the University of Gulu’s younger staff participate in the University of Naples’ Masters and Doctorate programmes. To date, one doctorate has been completed and another is in progress.
