Lund University awards Honorary Doctorate Degree to ARUA Secretary-General
Lund University, Sweden, invited the ARUA-Secretary-General Professor Ernest Aryeetey to receive an Honorary Doctorate degree in May 2020. The award ceremony was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The University has recently decided to merge the 2020 and 2021 award ceremonies, which will take place virtually at 10 am (GMT) on Friday, 28th May 2021. The ceremony will be live streamed from the website of Lund University on www.lu.se/doktorspromotion.
The award is in recognition of Ernest Aryeetey’s role in promoting the study of Africa at Lund University.
Lund University was founded in 1666 and is repeatedly ranked among the world’s top 100 universities. The University has around 44 000 students and more than 8 000 staff based in Lund, Helsingborg and Malmö.
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Ernest Aryeetey (born 1955) is a professor of development economics. He is well known in African academic circles and has played a crucial role for Lund University’s Africa strategy.
Aryeetey is an internationally renowned development economist. His research includes the significance of institutions for the development process, regional integration, economic reform and the implications of informal forms of finance for entrepreneurship in Africa.
Between 2009 and 2015, Aryeetey chaired the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). Alongside this, from 2010 to 2016, he was vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, prior to which he had been the director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Ever since 2007, when Aryeetey was director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), he has taken part in the Swedish-African research programme on agricultural development, Afrint, which is based at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Lund. Initially, Aryeetey was in charge of Ghana’s Afrint group and over the years he has contributed to forming long-lasting research links between the University of Ghana and the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Since 2015, Aryeetey has chaired the advisory group for Lund University’s strategy group for collaboration with Africa. He visits Lund every year in connection with the advisory group’s spring meeting and, in this context, he has lectured and taken part in the University’s Africa Days. Through his broad international networks and his commitment to the development of collaborations between African universities, Professor Aryeetey is a significant resource for future research collaborations between African universities and Lund University.