IIAS, the African Studies Centre (ASC), the University of Cape Town Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), and SEPHIS (the South South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development at the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam) are initiating a pilot programme: Asian Studies in Africa (ASA). This programme is intended to be a triangular transcontinental higher education capacity building programme involving partners in Africa, Asia and Europe. The African Studies Centre will take on a similar initiative to promote African Studies in Asia.

IIAS, ASC, HUMA, and SEPHIS are proposing to build educational capacities in the field of Asian Studies in a number of African centres of higher education, through the training of faculty and university administrators, and through curriculum and library development. The objective is to foster an autonomous Asia-focused African academic community that is able to train a critical mass of local experts on Asia and international relationships with Asia.

The present-day forms of intensive relationships of capital investments, commerce, political alliances and cultural transfers of knowledge, urgently call for systematic scholarly engagements with the past and present of Asian and African realities. An essential prerequisite for sustained socio-economic progress in African societies is the development of institutional academic infrastructures capable of delivering foundational knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. The access to knowledge of a world region that is as culturally diverse and economically powerful as Asia, will enable countries and citizens of Africa to embrace this new South-South inter-continental relation and benefit from all it has to offer.

Informed by years of experience in Asia and Africa, the initiators recognise the need for a solid and critical infrastructure of humanities and social science knowledge dissemination and research, of which a focus on Asian Studies in African institutions is an essential part. Europe and European institutions can play a positive role as the “relay” in a new, triangular, transcontinental configuration.