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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Among graduates of Ukrainian higher education institutions are former and current ministers, ambassadors, and judges from dozens of African countries. The study “Ukraine and Africa: A Shared History and Development for the Future” (Platform for Youth Initiatives Development and the Youth Council under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine with support from the International Renaissance Foundation) systematically assessed the scale of these ties for the first time and showed why Ukraine still has not fully utilized the resource it has built for more than half a century.
When talking about Ukraine’s contemporary policy toward Africa, people usually mention the opening of new embassies, diplomatic tours, or the fight for support for Ukrainian resolutions at the UN. But one of Ukraine’s most valuable resources on the continent emerged long before. It does not need to be created or financed from scratch — it already exists. For more than sixty years Ukrainian universities have trained future physicians, engineers, diplomats, and civil servants from dozens of African countries. The problem is that Ukraine almost does not work with this human capital.
Starting from the 1960-s years Ukrainian higher education institutions became part of the Soviet system of training cadres for young African states. In the 1971–1972 academic year every fifth foreign student in the Ukrainian SSR was a citizen of an African country. At that time, in Ukrainian higher education institutions overall studied 1253 students from dozens of countries on the continent. Through Kyiv University, Kharkiv Medical Institute, Odesa Institute of Naval Engineers, and dozens of other institutions, representatives from more than 35 African countries passed. They were trained as doctors, engineers, lawyers, and specialists in public administration.
Only among the graduates of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv’s Institute of International Relations are dozens documented who later became ministers of foreign affairs, ambassadors, judges of supreme courts, heads of state corporations, and other high-ranking officials in Kenya, Chad, Angola, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, and other countries. And this is only one Ukrainian university. How many similar stories are preserved in the archives of other educational institutions today is unknown.
Didier Issa Sadio, head of the African Council in Ukraine. He graduated from the National Aviation University in Kyiv.
However, the main problem is that a significant portion of graduates from the Soviet period do not associate their studies with an independent Ukraine. They studied in Russian, maintained connections through Soviet or Russian-language networks, and often perceive their student experience as part of the history of the USSR as a whole. It is Russian that remains their main cultural marker of historical ties with the country of study. Russia actively exploits this, positioning itself as the sole successor to the Soviet presence in Africa. While Ukraine hardly leverages its educational heritage, Moscow turns it into a powerful tool of its foreign policy.
In independent Ukraine, ties with Africa were developed on market terms. Ukraine remained competitive on the international education market due to affordable tuition, development of English-language programs, and the positive reputation shaped over years by graduates of African origin themselves. On the eve of a full-scale invasion, Ukrainian universities enrolled 26 259 students from African countries—the highest number in the history of independent Ukraine.
The full-scale war drastically changed the situation. By 2026, the number of African students had fallen by more than 94 percent and stood at 1567 people. At the same time, even in wartime, Ukrainian universities annually enroll about 380 new students from African countries, and representatives of more than forty countries continue to study in Ukraine. This means that despite unprecedented challenges, Ukrainian education has not completely lost its reputation. Instead, it has retained a minimal foundation and potential on which to rebuild cooperation after the war.
The problem lies in the fact that this potential remains almost uninstitutionalized. Ukraine still does not have a single alumni registry. Data remain scattered among individual universities, and responsibility for alumni work is not assigned to any state institution. From 65 to 90 percent of foreign applicants are drawn to Ukrainian universities through private agents, so institutions themselves often do not even maintain direct contact with their graduates. Added to this is another structural problem: almost three quarters of the contemporary African contingent are concentrated in Morocco and Nigeria, and two thirds of students study in three medical specialties. This model works, but it is narrow and vulnerable to any crisis.
Opening of the Ukrainian embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 12 April 2024 year.
Africa has long ceased to be a peripheral of world politics. The adoption in 2022 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Strategy for Relations with African States and the opening of seven new embassies have only confirmed the strategic importance of the African direction for Ukrainian foreign policy. But no diplomatic strategy will be fully effective if it is not based on already formed human ties and does not foster the creation of new ones. In this context, graduates of Ukrainian universities can become the network of trust on which long-term cooperation between Ukraine and African states will be built.
In order to transform the existing human capital into a real instrument of cooperation, Ukraine needs to create a unified alumni registry and assign coordination of efforts to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; document the testimonies of the 1960–1980 cohort while they can still provide them; encourage the transition to English-language and Ukrainian-language programs with maximizing the Ukrainian-language component in the curricula for African-origin students; institutionalize alumni work at the state and university levels; turn archival lists into living alumni networks where graduates become “ambassadors” of Ukrainian education.
Ukraine does not need to build its human capital from scratch with regards to Africa. It already exists. For more than sixty years Ukrainian universities have formed a network of people who today work in government agencies, diplomacy, medicine, education, and business in dozens of African countries, or are on that path. Most states spend decades and significant funds to build similar networks of influence. Ukraine already has them as a result of its own history of educational cooperation. The question is whether we can finally turn university archives into a tool of modern diplomacy, or continue to lose touch with our heritage.
At the presentation of the study.
Read the full study at the link: https://beacons.ai/youthcouncilmfa
The study “Ukraine and Africa: A Shared History and Development for the Future” was prepared by the NGO Platform for Youth Initiatives Development and the Youth Council under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine within the project with support from the International Renaissance Foundation. The material represents the authors’ position and does not necessarily reflect the position of the International Renaissance Foundation.
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