Board of Directors | N’Dri Assié-Lumumba
N'Dri T. Assié-Lumumba is a Professor of African and Diaspora education, comparative and international education, social institutions, African social history, and the study of gender in the Africana Studies at Cornell University. Professor Assié-Lumumba earned her Ph. D. in Comparative Education (Economics and Sociology of Education) from the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (U.S.A.) in 1982, two Masters and two undergraduate degrees in Sociology and History, respectively, from Université Lyon II, Lyon (France) between 1971/72 and 1974/75. She studied also at Université d’Abidjan, Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) and Université Laval, Québec, (Canada). She is Chercheur Associé at Centre de Recherches Architecturales et Urbaines (CRAU) at Université de Cocody, Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), and Research Affiliate of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance of the University of Houston, Houston (Texas, U.S.A.). She is co-founder and Deputy-Director of Pan-African Studies and Research Center in International Relations and Education for Development (CEPARRED), Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). In 2003, she was a Visiting Professor in the Center for the Study of International Cooperation in Education (CICE) at Hiroshima University, Hiroshima (Japan).
She has published numerous articles, books and monographs. An African expert and international authority on gender, in 2001 and 2006, she received special recognition on the International Women's Day by the International Students and Scholars Office and the Women’s Resource Center at Cornell University and she was a nominee of 2003 International Woman of the Year Award by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England.
She has served as a member of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy (CDP) from 2001 to 2006 and of Higher Education Scientific Committee for the Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) since 2004. She has been a member of the Council of Scholars of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa since 2008. She has served as senior evaluator, adviser, policy analyst, and resource person for projects and programs on African development and higher education for many institutions including several sub-units of the United Nations: various divisions of UNESCO; United Nations Division for Social Policy and Development; Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA); UNDP Africa bureau in New York City and country offices in Africa; UNICEF; UNIFEM; the South African Research Foundation; the International Development Research Center (IDRC); Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA); Africa America Institute; and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). She has worked with and is a member of many African professional associations and groups including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), African Women’s Millennium Initiative on Poverty and Human Rights (AWOMI), the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA-formerly Donors to African Education-DAE), Association of African Universities, the South African Centre for Education Policy Development, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Foundation Partnership for African Higher Education (Carnegie Corporation and Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations). She served as a regional adviser on the Advancement of Women in Africa to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) in preparation for the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing (China) in 1995.
She has worked in, and traveled to, many countries in North and South America, the Caribbean, Asia and Europe and throughout the African continent, where she is familiar with the complex realities of African social contexts and is involved with institutional building and human resource development. Fluent in several languages, she has adapted herself to every type of circumstance and enjoyed working directly with people in a great variety of social settings.