Cultivating Sustainability Damtew Teferra Damtew Teferra is coordinator of the African Higher Education Project at the Center for International Higher Education, School of Education, Boston College, where he is currently completing his doctoral studies in higher education. Endowments are one of the major resource bases for higher education institutions in the United States. An endowment is made up of monetary donations to the institutions from which it draws regular interest proceeds.
Numerous institutions maintain extensive networks to boost their endowment holdings.
It is certainly the affluence of the society, its unique tax system, the culture of charitable donation, and the recent strength of the economy that continue to drive the expansion of philanthropic initiatives in the United States. The main purpose of this prologue is not simply to underscore the significance of this unique means of generating resources for higher learning institutions but also to suggest how this innovative method might be emulated, expanded, improvised, and adapted in a different context, situation, and environment such as Africa and the Third World in general. The serious financial hardships with which most African higher learning institutions must constantly contend have been thoroughly documented. Except for a very few institutions, such as the University of Botswana, most of them suffer from serious shortages of skilled personnel and of financial, technical, and material resources. Of course, the state of higher learning institutions generally reflects the economic state of the country in which they exist.