About the Nairobi Center 

Columbia Global Centers in Nairobi is part of Columbia University's worldwide network of 11 centers dedicated to advancing research, scholarship, and teaching on a global scale. Our Center is a regional hub for collaboration, connecting Africa with Columbia's scientific expertise, technological innovation, and academic leadership. The Center provides Columbia students and academics with a base to conduct research in and for Africa.

Also known as Columbia Global Centers in Eastern and Southern Africa (CGC Africa), CGC | Nairobi, or the Nairobi Center, our Center was established in Kenya on May 12th, 2011. Officially launched in 2012 by the late H.E Hon. Mwai Kibaki, CGC Africa spent its first five years working closely with Columbia's Earth Institute to pursue the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. During this period, the Nairobi Center actively interacted with policymakers, governments, and regional institutions, offering evidence grounded in scientific research and expertise. Following the culmination of these goals in 2015, the Center's programmatic direction was reviewed and redefined.

Our mission has progressed to: 

  • Fostering the highest levels of knowledge and learning in and for Africa.
  • Serving as a hub for global curriculum and scholarly outreach in the region.
  • Ensuring that the academic initiatives of the Center are connected with Columbia and institutions worldwide.
  • Advancing Columbia's vision of developing 21st-century global citizens equipped to address today's most pressing challenges.

The revitalization of the Center in 2016 ushered in an exciting new era of objective, unbiased scholarship in and for Africa. The Nairobi Center aims to become the preeminent research and development institute, providing thought leadership, cutting-edge research, and expansion of scientific knowledge in the region. As an essential hub in the global Centers network and the only one to be based in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Center links Kenya and the continent to a vast body of knowledge, scholarship, and inquiry. It allows Sub-Saharan Africa to influence debates at the highest level.

To achieve this, the Center fosters collaboration between academic institutions, governments, the private sector, NGOs, and multinationals in Eastern and Southern Africa, linking them with Columbia University to address pressing global issues as equal partners.

The Center works closely with policymakers, governments, and regional and African-based institutions, providing them with objective, science-based advice free of bias or self-interest. The Center creates a platform for high-level policy dialogue and a forum that celebrates free speech, good governance, and basic human rights.

The Columbia Global Centers Network

There are currently 11 Columbia Global Centers operating in Amman, Athens, Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Tel Aviv and Tunis. The centers encourage new relationships across schools, institutes, and academic departments at Columbia. Attuned to the priorities and unique circumstances of its host region, each center leverages the University’s diverse intellectual capacities from across the undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools, as well as pursues a set of university-wide core activities that evolves over time based on the active engagement of faculty and students. The Centers help increase international content in the classroom; supplement the curriculum with international study abroad, internship opportunities, and course offerings; provide resources needed to attract students from abroad; facilitate research opportunities for Columbia students and faculty on globally relevant, interdisciplinary topics; and provide a point of ongoing engagement for international alumni.

Functioning as a network, the global Centers encourage teaching and research that require working across disciplinary boundaries, having a presence in multiple regions, and engaging non-Columbia experts and scholars from those regions. Some of the Centers’ programs and research initiatives are country-specific, some regional, and an increasing number are multi-regional, even global. The network is growing, and each Center has started by building strong links with universities and institutions in its respective region. The long-term ambition is that many programs will have a global reach and involve multiple Centers in the network to engage in global conversations.