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The Rift Valley Institute (RVI) is an independent, non-profit research and training organisation working with communities and institutions in Eastern Africa, including Sudan, South Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes region. Established in 2001, the RVI has offices in Kenya, the US and the UK.
The aim of the Institute is to bring local knowledge to bear on global information systems, advancing education, combating institutional amnesia, and modifying development practice.
The RVI's core activities can be summed up as action-oriented education: field research and the dissemination of knowledge about Eastern Africa, within the region and beyond. The RVI's research projects are designed to record and preserve indigenous culture, support local research capacity, promote human rights and inform global advocacy efforts.
The RVI works with educational institutions across the region and runs several in-country training courses. In the summer of 2012, there were three primary courses, covering Sudan/South Sudan, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. Each featured an intensive, week-long syllabus and was taught by both internationally recognized scholars and local experts. RVI courses emphasise the practical application of academic and technical knowledge to politics and development for local and expatriate aid workers, diplomats, peace-keepers, researchers and business people. An enlarged course schedule for 2013 will be announced in December 2012.
The Institute maintains an open-access digital library, the Sudan Open Archive of historical and contemporary books, documents and audio-visual media. The RVI's own website features free-to-download digital editions of the Institute's reports and publications, including The Sudan Handbook (2011).
The RVI's Executive Director is Professor John Ryle, who founded the Institute with Jok Madut Jok and Philip Winter. Fellows of the Institute are practitioners and academic specialists in the fields of human rights, history, anthropology, political science, economics, development, media, and law.
Hala al-Karib is a Sudanese fellow of the Rift Valley Institute and a member of the board of the Musawah organisation [1] who try to ensure equality and justice in Muslim family laws. [2]
The RVI has received financial support from organisations including the Open Society Institute, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the United States Institute of Peace, UNICEF, UNEP, and the UK Government Department for International Development (DFID). It has received donations from Small Voice (UK) and Times Newspapers and technical support from Compactive Digital Services (Budapest) and Halcrow Ltd (London).
The Institute works in collaboration with other organisations including the University of Juba, Sudan, the Southern Sudan Commission for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, the International Rescue Committee, the Bahr-el-Ghazal Youth Association, Save The Children Fund (UK), Bard College (New York), the Royal African Society, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British Institute in Eastern Africa, Rumbek Senior Secondary School; the Shading Tree; the World Bank; and the Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.[ citation needed ]
The Great Rift Valley is a series of contiguous geographic depressions, approximately 6,000 or 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) in total length, the definition varying between sources, that runs from the southern Turkish Hatay Province in Asia, through the Red Sea, to Mozambique in Southeast Africa. While the name remains in some usages, it is rarely used in geology as it is considered an imprecise merging of rift and fault systems.
The University for Peace (UPEACE) is an international university and intergovernmental organization established as a treaty organisation by the United Nations General Assembly in 1980. The university offers postgraduate, doctoral, and executive programmes related to the study of peace and conflict, environment and development, and international law.
The rich and varied music of Sudan has traditional, rural, northeastern African roots and also shows Arabic, Western or other African influences, especially on the popular urban music from the early 20th century onwards. Since the establishment of big cities like Khartoum as melting pots for people of diverse backgrounds, their cultural heritage and tastes have shaped numerous forms of modern popular music. In the globalized world of today, the creation and consumption of music through satellite TV or on the Internet is a driving force for cultural change in Sudan, popular with local audiences as well as with Sudanese living abroad.
Higher education in Mauritius includes colleges, universities and other technical institutions. Public university education has been free to students since 2019. The sector is managed by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) which has the responsibility for allocating public funds, and fostering, planning and coordinating the development of post-secondary education and training. Formerly the Tertiary Education Commission, in 2020 it was reformed into the HEC and a separate Quality Assurance Authority (QAA) for auditing of qualifications.
The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) is a dedicated training arm of the United Nations system. UNITAR provides training and capacity development activities to assist mainly developing countries with special attention to Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and other groups and communities who are most vulnerable, including those in conflict situations.
Development studies is an interdisciplinary branch of social science. Development studies is offered as a specialized master's degree in a number of reputed universities around the world. It has grown in popularity as a subject of study since the early 1990s, and has been most widely taught and researched in developing countries and countries with a colonial history, such as the UK, where the discipline originated. Students of development studies often choose careers in international organisations such as the United Nations, World Bank, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), media and journalism houses, private sector development consultancy firms, corporate social responsibility (CSR) bodies and research centers.
The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) is an international, non-profit organisation founded in 1987. Based in Arlington, Virginia, United States, the organization assists and supports elections and electoral stakeholders. Since 1987, IFES has worked in 145 countries and has programs in more than 50 countries throughout Asia-Pacific, Africa, Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and the Americas.
Slavery in Sudan began in ancient times, and had a resurgence during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). During the Trans-Saharan slave trade, many Nilotic peoples from the lower Nile Valley were purchased as slaves and brought to work elsewhere in North Africa and the Orient by Nubians, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs.
The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) was established in 1983 under the Lomé Convention between the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States and EU member states. Since 2000 CTA has operated within the framework of the ACP-EU Cotonou Agreement with a mission to “strengthen policy and institutional capacity development and information and communication management capacities of ACP agricultural and rural development organisations. It assists such organisations in formulating and implementing policies and programmes to reduce poverty, promote sustainable food security, preserve the natural resource base and thus contribute to building self-reliance in ACP rural and agricultural development.”. The centre is closed in 2020, after the end of the Cotonou Agreement and the subsequent end of its financing.
Peacebuilding is an activity that aims to resolve injustice in nonviolent ways and to transform the cultural and structural conditions that generate deadly or destructive conflict. It revolves around developing constructive personal, group, and political relationships across ethnic, religious, class, national, and racial boundaries. The process includes violence prevention; conflict management, resolution, or transformation; and post-conflict reconciliation or trauma healing before, during, and after any given case of violence.
Concordis International is a non-profit organization that works alongside and in support of official peace processes. They exist to improve the potential for lasting peace. The organization has headquarters in London and country-offices in the Central African Republic and Nouakchott, Mauritania. Concordis' historical roots are in peace-building work by the Newick Park Initiative in South Africa (1986–1991) and in post-genocide Rwanda (1994–1997).
John Rowland Ryle OBE is a British writer, anthropologist, social activist, filmmaker, teacher and publisher, with an interest in the history and culture of Eastern Africa. He is co-founder of the Rift Valley Institute, and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, New York.
Rift Valley Technical Training institute (RVTTI) is a public technical training institute located in the highland city of Eldoret, Kenya. It is one of the Technical Training Institutes in Kenya. The institution offers Artisan, Craft, Diploma and Higher Diploma Courses with bias to practical industrial applications.
The National Archive of South Sudan is located in Juba, South Sudan. The collection consists of tens of thousands of Sudanese and Southern Sudanese government documents running from the early 1900s, through the independence of Sudan in 1956 and Sudan's First (1955–1972) and Second (1983–2005) civil wars, to the late 1990s. The archives are run by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports in Juba, South Sudan.
Zeremariam Fre is an agriculturalist, specialising in the drylands, and is of dual Eritrean-British nationality. He is the founder and former director of the Pastoral and Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa (PENHA), where he now serves on the Board of Trustees as Treasurer.
Sudan Memory is an online archive and cultural heritage project, provided by an international group of partners with the aim of conserving and promoting Sudanese cultural heritage. In the course of the project, digital reproductions of books and newspapers, photographs and films, visual art and architecture, as well as of other cultural objects in Sudan were created and published on the project's website.
Khalil Farah was a Sudanese singer, composer and poet, who wrote his lyrics both in Sudanese colloquial as well as in Modern Standard Arabic. He is considered as one of the most prominent pioneers of the early 20th century renewal in singing and poetry in Sudan.
The College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum is the only public art school in Sudan. Its predecessor was founded by the British administration in 1945 as School of Design in the former Gordon Memorial College. In 1951, it was incorporated into the Khartoum Technical Institute that became the Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST) in 1971, and the school was renamed College of Fine and Applied Art.
Hala al-Karib or Hala Alkarib is a Sudanese activist against sexual violence in war. She is the regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA).