Sara Sweezy Berry (born 1940) is an American scholar of contemporary African political economies, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University [1] [2] and co-founder of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins.
Born in Washington, DC, Berry gained a B.A. in history from Radcliffe College in 1961 and an M.A. from University of Michigan in 1965. She received her PhD in economics at the University of Michigan in 1967 and has taught at Indiana University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, and Northwestern University.
Berry has published four books: Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (1975, Oxford: Clarendon Press) Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community (1985, University of California Press), Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Poverty, Power and the Past in Asante, 1896-1996 (2001, Heinemann), and No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993, University of Wisconsin Press). [1] Fathers Work for Their Sons won the 1986 Herskovits Prize for the year's best book on Africa.
She has worked as a consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the US Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Herskovits Book Awards Committee. She has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College.
Sub-Saharan Africa, Subsahara, or Non-Mediterranean Africa is the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lie south of the Sahara. These include Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the African countries and territories that are situated fully in that specified region, the term may also include polities that only have part of their territory located in that region, per the definition of the United Nations (UN). This is considered a non-standardized geographical region with the number of countries included varying from 46 to 48 depending on the organization describing the region. The African Union (AU) uses a different regional breakdown, recognizing all 55 member states on the continent—grouping them into five distinct and standard regions.
Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. Land reform can, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy or noble owners with extensive land holdings to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfers of ownership may be with or without compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land.
Molefi Kete Asante is an American philosopher who is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently a professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.
Widow inheritance is a cultural and social practice whereby a widow is required to marry a male relative of her late husband, often his brother. The practice is more commonly referred as a levirate marriage, examples of which can be found in ancient and biblical times.
The ASA Best Book Prize, formerly known as the Herskovits Prize, is an annual prize given by the African Studies Association to the best scholarly work on Africa published in English in the previous year and distributed in the United States. The prize was named after Melville Herskovits, one of the founders of the ASA. The title of the prize was changed in 2019 in response to efforts to decolonize African studies.
Beverly Grier is an American academic in the study of child labor Sub-Saharan Africa, and former professor of government at Clark University. She is also the former president of the African Studies Association. She currently serves as Interim Associate Dean for Curriculum & Student Affairs at North Carolina A&T State University.
Paul Richards is an emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and adjunct professor at Njala University in central Sierra Leone. He was formerly a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London for many years, and previously taught anthropology and geography, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Although access to water supply and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa has been steadily improving over the last two decades, the region still lags behind all other developing regions. Access to improved water supply had increased from 49% in 1990 to 68% in 2015, while access to improved sanitation had only risen from 28% to 31% in that same period. Sub-Saharan Africa did not meet the Millennium Development Goals of halving the share of the population without access to safe drinking water and sanitation between 1990 and 2015. There still exists large disparities among sub-Saharan African countries, and between the urban and rural areas.
Michael Mortimore was a British geographer and a prolific researcher of issues in the African drylands. He was an academic in Nigerian universities for over 25 years. He ran a British research consultancy, Drylands Research. He is best known for an anti-Malthusian account of population-environment relationships, More People, Less Erosion, and field-based studies of adaptation to drought.
Jane I. Guyer was the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
The culture, evolution, and history of women who were born in, live in, and are from the continent of Africa reflect the evolution and history of the African continent itself.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.
Dame Karin Judith Barber, is a British cultural anthropologist and academic, who specialises in the Yoruba-speaking area of Nigeria. From 1999 to 2017, she was Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Before joining the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham, she was a lecturer at the University of Ife in Nigeria. Since 2018, she has been Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Victor Mbarika is an American professor from Cameroon. He is currently the Stallings International Distinguished Scholar and MIS professor at East Carolina University within the University of North Carolina System, in Greenville, North Carolina, United States. He is the President, Board of Trustees of the ICT University.
Christopher R. Udry is an American economist who currently serves as King Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. Udry is the co-founder and current co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at the Kellogg School of Management. Udry's research focuses mostly on development economics, in particular rural development in Sub-Saharan Africa, to which he owes his position as one of the world's most prominent agricultural economists.
Abena Frempongmaa Daagye Oduro is the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Ghana where she also holds the position of Associate Professor of the Department of Economics. Having had 30 years of experience teaching, her areas of specialization are centred around gender and asset management, international economics, poverty analysis, macroeconomic theory and trade policy. Abena Oduro is the first Vice President of the Association for the Advancement of African Women Economists (AAAWE) where Professor of Economics in University of Kansas, Elizabeth Asiedu, is the founder and president. She is also the president elect of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), her tenure will be 2021 to 2022.
Takyiwaa Manuh is Ghanaian academic and author. She is an Emerita Professor of the University of Ghana, and until her retirement in May 2017, she served as the Director of the Social Development Policy Division, of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was also the Director of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana from 2002 to 2009. She is a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Deborah Fahy Bryceson is a British academic currently affiliated to the Centre of African Studies (CAS) at the University of Edinburgh and University of Uppsala. She pioneered research into sectoral change in Africa, looking primarily at 'transnational families' and coining the terms 'de-agrarianisation' and 'mineralized urbanization'. She has published 16 books and over 130 journal articles and book chapters, specialising on livelihood, labour, urbanization and agrarian studies.
Reginald Herbold Green was an American development economist who focused on African economic issues. His research focus included studying the economies of eastern and southern Africa, South African Development Community (SADC), international organizations and aid disbursement, and the Economic Commission on Africa, specializing in poverty alleviation, development enablement, and economic liberalization.
Allen Isaacman is an American historian specializing in the social history of Southern Africa. He is a Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. In 2015, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.