ASU, Ghana partnership enhances supply chain practices in Africa

As a New American University, ASU defines the communities it serves as including both its backyard neighbors and colleagues around the world. 

For the past four years, Arizona State University has partnered with a group of colleagues from Ghana to accelerate growth and development in Africa by enhancing supply chain management research and practice.

Last week, faculty and staff from the W. P. Carey School of Business bid farewell to their Ghanaian colleagues after a visit to the U.S. capital and a 10-day stay in Arizona, attending meetings and touring some of ASU’s innovative enterprises.

This week, they returned to their home country, reinvigorated and ready to implement what they learned to benefit their nation’s education system and supply chains across the continent.

“I’m very excited to go back home after what I’ve seen and experienced while at ASU,” said John Serbe Marfo, a lecturer at Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). “Africa is youthful. Africa is brilliant. And we’re all going back home to inspire our students and help them elevate Africa so it can take its rightful place in the world.”

Marfo is one of seven team members from KNUST who visited ASU Sept. 19–27. The two universities have partnered for the past four years to set up the Center for Applied Research and Innovation in Supply Chain – Africa, or CARISCA. The center is an initiative funded by the United States Agency for International Development.

The five-year, $15 million project is a joint effort of W. P. Carey’s Department of Supply Chain Management and the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems at the KNUST School of Business. It's the largest award in the W. P. Carey School’s history.

“Through this partnership, we’ve helped KNUST’s supply chain management faculty improve the quality of their research and get into better publications,” said Dale Rogers, the project’s principal investigator and executive directorRogers is also the ON Semiconductor Professor of Business at W. P. Carey.. “CARISCA has changed (KNUST) and education in Africa forever.”

Rogers credits ASU President Michael Crow for showing the way.

“President Crow said the role of a university is not just to teach students but to develop a lifelong relationship with them,” Rogers said. “This project is taking that idea and putting it into practice in Africa.”

ASU and KNUST’s shared vision for CARISCA started in mid-2020 and is now entering its fifth year. In that time, among its many achievements, the project has vastly improved the quality of KNUST’s scholarly publications, created a Career Services Office and kick-started an alumni relations program. It has also formed partnerships with industry leaders and funded scholarships for more than 140 graduate students. In spring 2024 alone, 17 CARISCA scholars graduated with a PhD in a supply chain management-related field.

CARISCA Project Director David Schlinkert said ASU is not only helping in the supply chain sector but also improving KNUST’s reach throughout Africa.

“We’ve co-created a proprietary software to enable KNUST to host a large variety of online courses and teach them at scale,” Schlinkert said. “This will enable KNUST to meet educational demand from across Africa.”

ASU hosted the seven Ghanaian team members following their visit to Washington, D.C., where they met formally with USAID staff and toured the Smithsonian and the U.S. Capitol building.

While in Arizona, the group interacted with W. P. Carey researchers and participated in a pair of supply chain department events.

“Since the CARISCA project started in 2020, ASU supply chain management faculty have regularly visited Ghana to interact with the KNUST team. This visit provided an opportunity for a reverse visit by the KNUST team,” said Adegoke Oke, chair of the W. P. Carey supply chain management department and a senior technical advisor to CARISCA. “The team visited the (supply chain management) department and interacted with faculty, participated in and presented at the Supply Chain Executive Consortium fall meeting and attended the Women in Supply Chain Symposium. 

"Seeing how the (consortium) is successfully run here at ASU will help the KNUST team achieve one of CARISCA's goals: to establish a Supply Chain Executive Council in Ghana.”

The visit also included tours of some innovative ASU enterprises, including the Luminosity Lab, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Global Futures Laboratory, LightWorks, Institute of Human Origins, Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, Dreamscape Learn, Meteor Studio and the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center.

“This visit to ASU showed us a completely new way of learning,” said Nathaniel Boso, CARISCA director and KNUST professor. “Our work with ASU is going to make it possible to bring so much to Ghana.”

Benjamin Ashong said he will attempt to replicate W. P. Carey’s One Button Studio, a self-service, high-quality video recording studio that can be used by all faculty and staff in the university, for KNUST.

“If we could implement something like this at KNUST, it could revolutionize teaching in Africa,” said Ashong, an IT officer for CARISCA. “We are also hoping to implement virtual reality as well.”

Seeing virtual reality employed in different academic disciplines also excited Jesse Anim, technical manager for CARISCA’s Innovations Lab, which is modeled on ASU’s Luminosity Lab.

“Students today have a very short attention span, and virtual reality is a way to help them improve their learning,” Anim said. “VR can help them learn about innovation, problem-solving and how they can apply it to the real world.”

Kekeli Adonu said how ASU collaborates across disciplines was a big eye-opener for her.

“There are a number of innovative spaces at ASU where film school students, engineers, chemists, scientists and animators all benefit from using the same labs,” said Adonu, director of monitoring, evaluation, research and learning at CARISCA. “This collaboration within the faculty has really opened my eyes to what we can do, or the things we can create when there’s cooperation.”

For Stephen Frimpong, the visit to ASU opened a picture window into how an idea can become a marketable commodity.

“These labs gave me a better understanding of how to commercialize academic ideas,” said Frimpong, CARISCA’s Innovations Lab administrative manager. “I saw how something could go from an idea to production to the market, and that was fantastic.”

Amos Eghan, CARISCA’s director of operations, said he was impressed by ASU’s practices.

“It’s a big university, but it’s very structured,” Eghan said. “The flow of the work, the professionalism they attach to it, creating an enabling environment for everybody to operate is something I came to appreciate.”

Those lessons will not only benefit Africa but also the entire world, Rogers said.

“Improving global supply chains in the past 25 years has lifted a billion and a half people out of poverty,” Rogers said. “We believe that what we are doing will move the needle even further. And by improving people around the world, you actually improve things here, too.”