But the Ghanaian tech entrepreneur was much more than that. I was introduced to him by his niece, my friend and BloggingGhana cofounder Sandra Chinery-Hesse and he seemed to accept me as part of the family from day 1.

He was controversial and always walked his own path. He was an organised humanist in one of the world’s most religious countries. He was innovative and always found a way. He followed his body clock for working hours (and cleverly avoided the Accra traffic) and was never seen before noon. He would often accept visitors lying down on a bench resting, not getting up, but rather throwing jokes at you from his horizontal position. At the tender age of 30, he told me some hard truths about midlife that I could only appreciate recently.

In addition to being unapologetically himself, he possessed – in my view -the most prized quality of them all – JOIE DE VIVRE. Alongside being one of Ghana’s more successful entrepreneurs, he loved to laugh, joke, make merry and party. My friend Ruth Wade Kwakwa wrote in her remembrance post that he was living LARGE, which I found just right.

Just last week we had an interaction online about there being a space in Google’s headquarters named after him, but no space, building or room in Ghana (I expect that is about to change). He included three (!) smiling emojis!

Without Herman the world is a bit more boring, square and gray. That is if we do not fill the void by taking it all both more seriously and more lightly.

RIP Herman Chinery-Hesse.

Almost all Swedes are online every day (91%) and use digital identification (93%) (which is basically monopolized, not very safe!)

Swedes are very positive toward police access to private conversations, and cameras with face recognition in public spaces (possibly due to increased violence) but against employers checking social media. There seems to be a “not in my backyard”-Internet thing going on here…

Different generations use different social media platforms. Favorites in the older generations are YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram (a big share of youth do not use Facebook and Instagram at all) while Snapchat, Tiktok and Roblox are important platforms for “born in the 2000s”. Based on this, are you “old” or “young”?

3/10 Swedes have used an AI tool like Chat GPT, DallE, Midjourney, Grammarly. If you break it down by age, there is a definite gap as 6/10 in the age group 18-34 years have used an AI tool.

Podcast listening in Sweden is still on the increase and public service has transitioned well there!

#svenskarnaochinternet#digitalization#socialmedia

Much more to discover in the rich report. Read a summary in English or the full report in Swedish (PDF).

What is this index?

The Scientists on Social Media rating was developed by journalist and social media specialist Mike Young. It is called the #TwiLiIndex (pronounced “twiligh index”).

I was not the only one from my institution. No from KTH Royal Institute of Technology the colleagues on the index (their ratings in brackets) were Tigran Haas (20), Ricardo Vinuesa (25), Eva Hartell (56), Lucie Delemotte (68), and Cecilia Hermansson (86). I am organizing a learning lunch for us to meet in person and am looking forward to hearing about my colleagues’ best practises, strategies and ideas.

Online presence for scholars

There is an ongoing debate within the research community if social media presence is important as a way of disseminating knowledge. If so, it should be included in our job description. The other side sees social media engagement as unimportant “fluff”. Perhaps it is only for researchers who have nothing better to do. There is also the aspect what having a “personal brand” does with us as researchers. Not to speak of our place in the world as observers. Are we just helping publishers and employers make more money in a world where fixed employment has become elusive and rare? Is an argument for instance discussed here by Johanna Arnesson (Swe).

Of course, I feel it is very important to have a presence online, as it is a way to reach out with research findings, but also provide perspectives from my corner on current events or debates. However increasingly I feel conflicted that we publicly funded scholars engage on platforms owned by for-profit entities, far from the public, democratic agoras we were hoping for when I started my engagement online with first this blog, an account on Facebook and then organization for bloggers some 15 years ago.

Here I’d like to be a bit critical of my researcher colleagues. This hot debate makes some academics comfortably hide and not use the available tools to communicate with the world outside academia. Thus the fact that I am on this list with moderate effort means many of my researcher colleagues are not. Or if they are they are not maximizing their presence, for instance by sharing only in Swedish and thus followed mostly in Sweden which is a small market.

Whats next?

Next month, I am meeting with KTH colleagues to discuss best practises on social media.

After a three year period of slowing down my use of social media, I have started to again tweet (mostly live-tweet from interesting events in English) and blog. I am also increasing postings on LinkedIn especially on career related issues.

Slowly, slowly, and this is the first time I say so publicly, I am starting a communications agency with a focus on the academic sector. Reach out if you want my help!

I wrote an article for The Conversation, a place where academics can write based on their research for larger audiences, called “Understanding Ghana’s students is key to fixing the country”. The inspiration was the Fix The Country protests that have been ongoing for months in Ghana.

I opened with some background,

“A great many African countries had shown steady economic growth in the decade prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But all have failed to adequately create opportunities for the young people in their countries. With growing youth populations, creating paths for education and employment is a make or break issue for the continent.

But there’s also good news. Many young people are getting access to secondary education and an increasing number also university education. An increasing share of youth in Africa are university students, 9% in 2018.

In today’s knowledge economy, university students carry a key role in development. They are therefore an important group to study and understand better.”

My study on migration aspirations of university students in Ghana showed there were indeed interest in going abroad for at least on year, especially for studies. However a majority of respondents also wanted to return, and some (8%) also were not at all interested in living abroad. My main point in the article is that knowing the dreams and aspirations of young people is important in policy planning.

Similarly, a New African Magazine article series African Youth Speaks made room for African youth to speak their truth with the following motivation

“It is the responsibility of the older, more mature segment of a society to prepare the ground for the youth to thrive by providing quality education, training, mentoring, guidance, encouragement, sympathy and love and affection to the young, who have their own growing-up demons to deal with in addition to other forms of personal development. If this is lacking, the youth are cast adrift. “

Kenyan music producer Wachira Warukira, writes in New African Magazine about how Covid hit his dream and business:

“I had started my music studio in July 2019. As with any other business, the first 5-6 months were awful, and I could barely break even. Like many other Kenyan young entrepreneurs, I was looking for loans, but nobody really supports a start-up.

With the new restrictions, which included the need to ‘work from home’, things changed quite rapidly. As a music producer, I had to have the artist in the studio physically. With the curfew laws, I lost all my clients.”

When this happened, I was one of the people Wachira called as he is an old student of mine. We talked about possible solutions in the meantime and he started applying for jobs. In the special Issue, Wachira admirably writes:

“After a few months of applying for jobs and getting rejected, I went back to the drawing board and came up with a hybrid business plan that allows me to either work with artists on site or online. I am still working hard to sustain the business, but I can say one thing for sure: my dream did not die. It just got better, and I will keep looking for ways to survive in this new normal. “

Wachira’s personal conclusion is similar to the findings of my research, that African youth are not “opting out” by migrating. Rather they are craving opportunities and making deliberate plans to be able to contribute and build at home.

Want to know more about this topic? Read the entire New African Magazine issue and my article on The Conversation. Follow Wachira Warukira’s work at Waruks Productions.

Together with Swedish think-tank Global Utmaning, I have written a chapter in an anthology on Swedish policy for a stronger EU in areas such as migration, climate, finance, new technologies such as artificial intelligence, youth, and many more. The ambition of the anthology is to also show how these policy areas overlap like human rights and migration, democracy and climate, development assistance, and trade.

Sweden joined the EU for economic reasons after the referendum in 1994. Since then the world has changed and EU has become a very political organization. The political climate has become more polarised and major issues are not resolved within the union. The very organization created to avoid war and conflict has not dealt very well with shocks. The Syria crisis with refugees and the ongoing migration from Africa have exposed the weaknesses of EU countries not being able to work together to provide shelter for the needy and fair process for those wishing to stay. The covid pandemic was another shock the EU did not handle well. BREXIT meant the EU for the first time has been challenged by real threats of falling apart. Taken together, the EU is shaking and can therefore not be a very strong voice in the world.

My Contribution

I wrote about migration and integration. The recommendations coming out of my chapter which tried to broaden the conversation to labor market needs and possible solutions used the Software Development-project at KTH that I work with as an example. My policy recommendations for Sweden in the EU were (translated here):

SWEDEN SHOULD:

• Act to change the view of immigrants and their integration into society, in line with
The EU’s new integration action plan, ie to value the indispensable value of immigrants
contribution to our society;
• Prioritize a sustainable, harmonized, and long-term migration and integration policy –
within the framework of a common European regulatory framework – based on principles inline
with EU’s core values such as rule of law. This policy area should get more resources because it
is both a social and economic investment for the future;
• Question the Migration Commission’s focus on temporary residence permits for
asylum seekers and return processes based on protection reasons that often do not change
significantly over a period of a few years.

Online Launch

The seminar (in Swedish only) that launched the anthology “A strong EU, in Sweden’s interest” whas broadcast on YouTube and featured politicians as well as one of the editors of the anthology, Hans Alldén.

Some issues that were discussed were: What is a stronger EU? More united? Faster by taking majoritarian decisions instead of seeking consensus? More power and responsibility in the world? Better decisions taking the subsidiary principle into account? What can Sweden bring to the table?

Interesting issues raised by invited panellists were among others:

Jutte Guteland (S): Media do not cover European politics means weak transparency, despite much power with the EU.

Jakop Dalunde (Mp): Nobody keeps me accountable as a parliamentarian in the EU.

Hanne Waerland-Fager (Eu youth dialogue): We have to learn about what issues different political levels are in charge of, when we go to elections for the EU parliament we should discuss issues that EU is mandated to address.

Göran von Sydow (Director Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies): The pandemic is an interesting example where health is a national responsibility, but these measure affects EU at large, however collaborative measures were not happening.

You find the anthology (in Swedish) here: https://www.globalutmaning.se/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/05/Ett-starkt-och-ha%CC%8Allbart-EU-i-Sveriges-intresse.pdf

The event was held on November 9th and now with days to the election, the Policy Note is in! The text was written together with one of the panelists from the event, a real Ghanaian scholarly treasure, Prof Kwesi Aning of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre!

In the policy note, we write “In the upcoming Ghanaian elections, a woman has, for the first time, emerged as a vice-presidential candidate for one of the two major parties in the country. Her candidacy has sparked hopes of progress on gender equality, but has also triggered anti-feminist and misogynistic rhetoric.”

Thanks to all involved in making the event and the policy note possible.

Read it in full here in PDF, Issuu and here in an online version.

A dream came through a few weeks ago: I was a participant in Sweden’s foremost event for the written word, the Gothenburg Bookfair.

I remember the first time I attended the fair as a student. I took the train from Uppsala to Gothenburg and stayed with a classmate. On the morning of, I walked towards the exhibit area and the closer I got the more people joined me. Outside the Göteborgsmässan, colorful banners were up everywhere and the queue was long. Once inside, I was still shocked by the intensity, heat, and ferocity of book conversations, seminar events, the crowd streaming back and forth… and they were all holding (intellectual prints adorned) tote bags filled to the brim with new, exciting books. As a book nerd, I felt like I had died and come to heaven.

So when I colleague kind of casually asked if I would be alright with attending the book fair as part of my job, I might have screamed a YES too loud to be professional. I proposed a seminar, very hopefully assuming the corona crisis would be over around this time. “Africa after the Corona crisis: Digitalisation, Culture and Freedom”.

I suggested a long list of creatives I thought would to justice to the topic. In the end, this was the lineup:

Moderator

• Görrel Espelund, Journalist and Author

Panelists

• Mantse Aryeequaye, Director of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Ghana
• Ainehi Edoro, Founder and editor-in-chief of Brittle Paper online literary magazine for African literature
• Kajsa Hallberg Adu, Postdoctoral Researcher at NAI and co-founder of BloggingGhana

We spoke of effects of the Corona crisis on culture, but also on education and freedom – and how digitalization is playing a more important (and more divisive) role now than ever.

While I was hoping I would be at the fair physically, I could see myself being ushered through a dense crowd of sweaty and happy book lovers together with some extraordinary creatives to a well-lit stage and later join the crowd in browsing for books for 48 hours or so, as we all know, the Corona crisis is not over, and close-knit gatherings of sweaty thousands of people handing objects to each other are off the table for now. Thus this experience with Mantse and Ainehi calling in was second best, but still, quite the success if I may say so myself. However, a sweet side-effect is the webinar is available well beyond Gothenburg and Sweden.

You can watch the 30-minute webinar here.

Comfort Maame Ekua Adu was my husband’s sister and became my sister too. When I was new in Ghana, I would meet her on the way to Community 1 Market where she would sit outside her friend’s shop and she would always wave me to stop and chat in a way that strengthened me and made me feel seen and often she made me laugh. In the family, she was a powerhouse and almost had an inner engine that seemed to propel her forward. She could kickstart us into different projects and at times step on toes as she hurried forward. Comfort was also the natural center of the party, coordinating the people involved, divvying up the food, and starting the dance on the dancefloor with a big, deep laugh.

Despite her natural speed, deep voice, and power, she moved with kindness. She took time to talk when we met, was tough when tough love was needed and hugged me with a squeeze so hard it almost made me breathless.

I seek comfort in that while our sister Comfort Maame Ekua’s life was too short, it was also inspirational, especially to women since she was unapologetically herself and in a way that encouraged others around her to live their desired life in a society that puts a lot of pressure on conforming to the norm. She had a large circle of friends, and over the last weeks, I have come to understand she knew almost everyone in our hometown of Tema! She lived alone and adopted and loved two girls.

As the autumn colored the leaves yellow and red, the skies turned grey, and the last sunrays of summer were seen less frequently each day here in Sweden. This past rainy weekend, Comfort was given her last rest in Ghana. Our sister Comfort spread joy and comfort and while I hate to write that in the past tense, I think that is the nicest thing one can say about a person. That is why so many will miss her sorely.

It is September and I am back on the blog. Over the summer, I decided to take an extended social media break after reading rhetoric expert Elaine Eksvärd’s post about being present with family (in Swedish). So I was just that: present. With the family I moved apartments, we went on a little trip, swam in Stockholm’s many water bodies and played many rounds of cards!

But now the air is crisp and some leaves are turning yellow, kids are in school and I am back behind the keyboard, working, and planning the autumn. Being a teacher at heart, this time of year smells of new beginnings, new possibilities, and “bouquets of sharpened pencils” as it was phrased in the film “You’ve Got Mail”. To top it off, my PostDoc at NAI is coming to an end in December so I am also planning for the next stage of my career. Probably more on that in another blog post soon!

Speaking of my workplace, we are now back in the office one day a week and that feels somehow perfect. The Covid-19 pandemic meant we were fully Working From Home and although that saved me a pretty long commute, I do miss having a workplace and colleagues. One day a week is perfect for fitting important meetings, water-cooler-small-talk — without feeling constantly on the hamster-wheel like commuting sometimes do.

For this fall, I am continuously working on the project The Space and Role of Political Science in the Evolving Democratic Transformation in Africa – right now on two papers: the first is about curriculum development in some selected African universities’ political science departments and the second on bibliometric data or research output in the social sciences in our case countries.

In addition to that, I have listed the papers I want to finish from other projects (read: the dissertation), the books I want to read (and maybe write a few book reviews?), the people I want to meet, even if by a 2m distance, the food I want to cook (this time of year is so food-fantastic!), and the blog and Instagram posts I want to share.

A few weeks ago, I did not think this feeling would come, but here it is: I am welcoming the autumn and all that comes with it!

What are your autumn plans?

Find the paper in full (open access) here: Student migration aspirations and mobility in the global knowledge society: The case of Ghana

The journal is called the Journal of International Mobility and is a French journal – I just love how abstract and bio is also available in another language. It is also an open-access journal meaning researchers and others can read it for free and download /télécharcher it as it is not behind a paywall. I found it as they were publishing work on academic mobility, international student migration and I thought it could be a good fit.

What does it mean to publish a paper?

This means a section of my research is now available for easy consumption and critique. That means I am part of a global conversation about my topic, much more than if I only left results in my 300+ page dissertation (PDF). In this paper, I chose to focus on my quantitative data (two more papers out of my thesis yet to be published have a more qualitative focus drawing on focus groups and interviews) on student migration aspirations.

Morover, I contextualize the situation for student migrants out of the global south – unequal access to higher education, under- and unemployment after graduation, hardship acquiring visas to further studies abroad, the global knowledge society where student migrants provide 3% of trade in services in the OECD. I explain how Ghana is a good case study with outmigration among highly skilled close to Africa’s average and high levels of graduate unemployment. I review the international student migration (ISM) literature and suggest students from the global south are understudied. I ask: “Do students from the global south aspire to be mobile? Are they mobile? How do they experience the global knowledge society?” With survey data from 467 Ghanaian students I respond to these questions and find that (quoting from the abstract, or summary):

…the students aspire to migrate, mostly for educational reasons. However, many of these students also aspire to return, others to live transnational lives, and one in twelve students surveyed are not interested in migrating—that is, in leaving Ghana for more than one year. These results show that university students in Ghana often imagine their future at home, but their life strategies include graduate school and gaining work experience abroad. Hence, mobility, but perhaps not necessarily migration, is a central feature of their life aspirations.

What does it really mean to me to publish a paper?

Emotionally, the email and publication shook me to the core. It has been such a long ride and now this seems…small?

Late nights transcribing interviews, tabulating survey data. Versions of this paper dating back to 2017. Having a colleague critique and then rewriting the paper. Getting it rejected once. Getting many comments on what is now the published paper, but pressing through. It was hard until the end, too… The final edited version I had to correct twice (a misunderstanding meant the copyeditor needed the changes in a different format). The emails sent to ask for an update on the process.

Now, I had the email blinking a URL at me on the screen with a “published” in a sentence next to it.

Was this it?

After a drink with my husband to celebrate, and this email to tell you all, I am pressing on with other slow, thoughtful, and important scholarly work. But after taking a few weeks of vacation!

Read more about my Ph.D. project on its website StudentMigrationAspirations.com