About This Initiative2007 Activities
Network Scholarship Programs fund the participation of students, scholars, and professionals from Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Mongolia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia in competitive academic programs outside of their home countries. Scholarship programs work to revitalize and reform the teaching of the social sciences and humanities, provide professional training in fields unavailable or underrepresented at institutions in scholars’ home countries, and assist outstanding students from a range of backgrounds to pursue their studies in alternative academic and cultural environments.
The following are highlights from among the many achievements of program scholars in 2007:
After earning a PhD in economics at Staffordshire University, Avdullah Hoti was appointed as a senior advisor to Kosovo’s minister of education, science, and technology. Hoti persuaded the minister to direct 5 percent of the University of Pristina’s self-generated revenues to research. He also convinced the university to hire a vice dean for research in each of its academic faculties, as well as a vice rector for research. Hoti’s promotion of research in the university helped facilitate the adoption of European financing systems that give students at Kosovo universities opportunities to study abroad. Hoti also prepared a paper on Kosovo higher education that the government is using to advance its membership in the Bologna Process, an EU higher education initiative that aims to create common European higher education standards by 2010.
Elnura Gurbanova, an Azeri alumna of a joint OSI/German Academic Exchange Service scholarship program, worked with other Azeris educated overseas to prompt the government in Azerbaijan to channel a portion of the country’s oil revenues into scholarships for study abroad. As a result, the government announced in 2007 that it plans to fund upwards of 15,000 scholarships over the next seven years. The program will be administered with help from Fuad Ahmadov, a Scholarship Program faculty fellow currently at Columbia University.
Munir Nuseibah, an alumnus of the Palestinian Rule of Law Program, worked in 2007 as a lecturer at the Al-Quds Human Rights Clinic in Palestine. The clinic, the first accredited program of its kind in the Arab world, documents human rights violations in the Palestinian territories and teaches undergraduate law students. Nuseibah, who received his LLM from the American University’s Washington College of Law, taught a course that connects students to practitioners so that they can learn from real human rights cases. The clinic bolsters this learning by having students provide supervised free legal services to the public.
