Our Impact

The Women in Higher Education (WiHE) Fellowship brought together a global cohort of twenty women for professional development, networking, mentoring, and peer exchange. Fellows ranging from PhD researchers and teaching faculty to administrators and early-to-mid-career professionals gathered for a ten-month online experience. Hosted by Dr Julia Sargent (UK) and Dr Ilka Kostka (USA), and supported by Professors Without Borders under the leadership of Dr Caroline Varin, the Fellowship was designed to celebrate and give voice to women in higher education while addressing the real and recurring challenges they face.

Offered at no cost, the programme also aimed to make mentoring and growth accessible to women regardless of where they are in the world or in their careers. As such, the Fellowship is built around a vision of empowerment and interdisciplinary exchange in a community that is both safe and genuinely supportive. The Fellowship offered a varied programme designed to foster learning and connection. Fellows participated in monthly one-hour virtual seminars led by expert women from across global institutions. Small group mentoring sessions, facilitated by a team of four volunteer mentors, offered a more intimate space for reflection, guidance, and personalised support. Fellows reflected on talks and mentoring sessions by posting in a shared Padlet. The programme was further shaped by a mid-year recap that gave the cohort a chance to pause and reflect on their journey together, before culminating in an end-of-year celebration that honoured both the growth and the community built across ten months.

Looking ahead, the Fellowship will welcome its next cohort with even greater momentum. Applications for the upcoming year significantly increased compared to the previous year, which reflects a growing recognition of the programme and the need it meets for women in higher education. This enthusiasm is a clear signal that the Fellowship is resonating and that the community it is building is one that women across the world are eager to be part of. The core elements that have shaped the Fellowship will carry forward into the next cohort, and the team is exploring different mentoring opportunities to further strengthen the support available to Fellows.

When Professor Ernest Fokoué landed in Accra on a rainy Saturday in June, a reception team from the University of Cape Coast (UCC) was waiting at the airport. By Monday morning our educator had toured the campus, met the Dean of the School of Economics, and was ready to teach.

Professor Fokoué, a professor of statistics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, spent the week leading an intensive workshop on Bayesian Networks and Impact Evaluation in Economics. Each day followed the same rhythm in the Old Academic Board Chamber: a morning of lectures, then an afternoon in the lab, where faculty, researchers, and graduate students put every concept straight into practice in R.

What made the week distinctive was its insistence on local relevance. No idea was presented without its code running live, and every method met a Ghanaian or African dataset within minutes of being introduced. Participants modelled poverty and education using Ghana's national living standards survey of over 14,000 households, and evaluated the country's LEAP cash transfer programme as a case study in measuring what really works. From randomised controlled trials to propensity score matching and regression discontinuity design, these are the tools that turn data into evidence for policy.

By Friday, participants were presenting their own mini-projects, each a reproducible analysis they could take home, and the week closed with what Professor Fokoué called the Grand Synthesis: bringing causal evidence and Bayesian modelling together into a single framework. All session materials, lab notebooks, and datasets have since been shared with UCC, where they will support teaching, research supervision, and policy analysis long after the workshop's end.

We are proud to have strengthened the partnership with UCC and to support a generation of economists equipped to bring rigorous, data-driven evidence to the decisions that shape their country.