The Politics of Educational Borrowing: Reopening the Case of Achimota in British Ghana

Scholars in comparative education frequently cite the case of Achimota as an early example of an educational transfer in which an American model industrial education for African Americans was transferred to the African continent. Borrowed specifically from the Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, this model provided industrial education for African Americans living in the racially segregated South. The British policy of borrowing complemented active lending policies from the United States, particularly those of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a New York-based philanthropic society whose mission it was to promote the education of natives and blacks both in the United States and abroad.