Paper long abstract:

Kasetsart University, Thailand's first agricultural university, has widely collaborated with African universities, NGOs and governments for several decades. This partnership has been forged through technical assistance, exchange programmes and postgraduate scholarships. However, the so-called 'exchange' is still far from reciprocal. In Thailand, little is still known about Africa, and there is a grave lack of body of knowledge on Africa in Thailand. Despite long-term commitment through development cooperation with African countries and institutions, a holistic approach has not been implemented to forge even greater relations between Thailand and Africa.

With the idea of creating a common ground for Thai and African scholars, the Faculty of Social Sciences at Kasetsart University is establishing a centre know as Kasetsart University Africa-Asia Centre (KU-AAC) to promote multidisciplinary research on Africa. The centre aims at providing research grants for new and mid-career researchers who wish to conduct comparative research on Asia-Africa. It also wishes to act as a bridge between faculties within Kasetsart University, government ministries and other Africa-related partners and create a new interactive platform. In future, the centre plans to implement a new multidisciplinary postgraduate curriculum where Africans can learn about Thailand as much as Thailand can learn from Africa.

Currently, the Centre has gone through the brainstorming phase where a group of scholars from different parts of Africa and Southeast Asia gave their ideas on how the centre can be organized and implemented in a sustainable way. We hope that we can start accepting research proposals at the beginning of 2021.

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