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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has awarded a 50,000 dollar-grant 40 paired winners of the Africa-US Higher Education Initiative Planning Grant Competition. The 40 partnerships, selected from a pool of 300 highly qualified applicants, were expected to use the grants to develop plans that addressed national and regional development priorities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Mr Peter McPherson, President of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities in US, disclosed this on Friday at a press conference organised by Association of African Universities (AAU) in Accra. �The process would improve the understanding of the critical role of institutional partnerships between African and US institutions for sustained capacity building and addressing developmental issues especially in Africa,� he said. The competition, organised in collaboration with the Higher Education for Development (HED), is aimed at supporting planning for long-term partnerships to strengthen the capacity of African higher education institutions and to enhance the engagement of US educational institutions on the continent. Mr McPherson, who is also an Emeritus Professor of Michigan State University, US, expressed the hope that the expected institutional partnerships between African and US institutions would build a problem-solving capacity to strengthen African universities to enable them address challenges beleaguering the continent. �This 10-year relationship would be African-driven, so that it would build administrative capacity of these African universities as well as to engage the students to develop various sectors of the economy of their countries,� he said. He said African universities needed to educate millions of its enrolled students in a manner that would enable the students solve developmental challenges on the continent. �African universities are the important part of the problem-solving process on the continent,� he said. Prof. Silas Lwakabamba, Rector of National University of Rwanda, said monitoring and evaluation activities had been instituted by the governing body of the partnership project to ensure that the paired winners used the grant to achieve the desired long-term collaboration. Ghana is represented by students from University of Education, Winneba and Regent University College of Science and Technology as recipients of the grant.