Join us for a conversation between Professor Nicholas Rush Smith and Kadijah Amoah, Baafour Otu-Boateng, and Mandisa Mathobela, Eisenhower Fellows who are leading the fight for climate change.
This is an In-Person event at Shepard Hall 107.
Please Note:
**Everyone who attends in-person must be ready to display evidence of full vaccination upon entering Shepard Hall. See Covid Guidelines below.
COVID-19 GUIDELINES
All attendees must be vaccinated, and masks are required.
For guests (non-CUNY, non-CCNY attendees), here is the Cleared4 link for registering and submitting vaccination credential.
This needs to be done at least 3 days in advance of the event. ((bit.ly/Health-Verification-GUEST))
The Eisenhower Fellowships bring together innovative leaders from around the world. Their 2022 Africa Program Fellows come from across Sub-Saharan Africa and are working to address the challenges of climate change, which have brought on increased floods and droughts, diminished crop yields and food shortages, cross-border migrations, international conflicts, and political instability. CCNY Professor Nicholas Rush Smith will be in conversation with three Africa Program Fellows – Kadijah Amoah, Baafour Otu-Boateng, and Mandisa Mathobela – to discuss their work.
Nicholas Rush Smith is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His research utilizes qualitative methods to examine how democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens sometimes use violence to challenge that order. Based on approximately twenty months of ethnographic and archival research, his first book, Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019), explored these themes through the lens of crime, policing, and vigilantism in South Africa. With Erica S. Simmons, he has also written about the intersection of comparative and ethnographic methods, co-editing Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), among other publications. Currently, he is working on two book projects related to these themes. The first examines the politics of police violence in democratic states, focusing on South Africa. The second explores the practice of ethnography. His work has also been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, among other outlets.
Kadijah Amoah is the CEO of Aker Energy Ghana Ltd. A lawyer with a post-graduate degree in strategy and innovation from the University of Oxford, Amoah is the first Ghanaian woman to lead an oil-and-gas company. Its main asset is a massive seabed oil field, 2000 meters deep, covering 2,100 square kilometers. Her company, a subsidiary of a 180-year-old Norwegian enterprise, also is invested in the first internationally accredited pipe-fitting and welding training center in Ghana, creating jobs for local citizens in an industry that ordinarily employs expatriates. Prior to joining Aker, Amoah worked on business development in the office of the vice president of Ghana, where she developed a paperless, digital strategy that reduced the turnaround time for the clearance of goods in Ghana’s ports from three weeks to three days. On fellowship she wants to create a Renewable Energy Fund, financed by major institutions, to support Ghanaian solar, wind-energy, biomass and waste-to-energy companies in their start-up and intermediate phases of development.
Baafour Otu-Boateng is Investment Director of Investisseurs & Partenaires in Ghana. A specialist in clean energy resources, Otu-Boateng is responsible for his company’s investments in English-speaking West Africa. A graduate of the University of Oxford and Williams College, he formerly worked as an analyst with UBS Investment Bank in New York. He is on the board of Rensource Holdings, an African solar-power technology company, which recently transformed the poultry sector in West Africa by teaming with Empower Energy to install a 700-kilowatt solar plant at Nigeria’s largest egg producing company. The plant is designed to generate one gigawatt hour of clean energy annually and eliminate the discharge of 25,000 tons of CO2 over the unit’s lifetime. As vice chair of World Vision Ghana, a Christian relief organization, Otu-Boateng oversees strategy and fundraising for climate-smart agriculture, clean water and sanitation improvements across Ghana’s rural communities. On fellowship he wants to create a nonprofit collective of commercial banks to spark new investments in bold climate-action initiatives. The alliance he envisions will present a cohesive platform to attract financing that will benefit thousands of small- and medium-sized enterprises across the continent. As Africa begins taking advantage of a continental free-trade agreement that came into effect on Jan. 1, 2021, Otu-Boateng wants to ensure that the resulting economic growth is channeled to make a positive impact on the environment.
As the Country Partnerships Manager of UNICEF South Africa, Mandisa Mathobela directs leadership on corporate and private-sector partnerships and engages with other UNICEF National Committees to explore regional opportunities for collaboration. Previously Mathobela oversaw shareholder engagement at Old Mutual Limited, a 176-year-old financial services firm based in Cape Town with 13 million customers and $70 billion in assets under management, including $9 billion in low-carbon, resource-efficient investments, part of her area of responsibility, and South Africa’s largest wind-farm project. On fellowship Mathobela wants to partner with UBank South Africa and work with local youth to launch the African Youth Initiative for Climate Action Entrepreneurship (AYICAE), a job-creation and consciousness-raising program to train unemployed youth and young people ages 18 to 35 for work in the growing green-energy space, including the solar, hydro and recycling industries.
