About 29,000 people from Africa study in degree and non-degree programmes at St Petersburg University

An ‘African’ component and choice of foreigners

Among the most popular degree programmes chosen by students from Africa are ‘General Medicine’, ‘Economics and Management’, and ‘Physics’.

Additionally, at present, St Petersburg University offers more than ten academic programmes involving the study of languages, history and culture, economics and politics of Asian and African countries: ‘Languages and Cultures of East Africa: Ethiopian Studies’; ‘Asian and African History’; ‘Asian and African Cultures’; ‘Asian and African Literatures’; ‘Politics and International Relations in Asia and Africa’; ‘Asian and African Religions’; ‘The Socio-Cultural Anthropology of the Peoples of Asia and Africa’, ‘Asian and African Economies and International Economic Relations’; and ‘Asian and African Languages’ to name just a few. The African languages currently taught at St Petersburg University are Amharic, Bamana, Ge’ez (Ethiopian), Swahili, Hausa, Maninka, Mandinka, and Kinyarwanda.

Promotion of the Russian language in African countries

St Petersburg University also invests heavily in international cooperation in science and education, and promotes the Russian language abroad. To date, St Petersburg University has opened eight foreign representative offices, as well as more than 100 Russian language centres in 50 countries throughout the world. In autumn, face-to-face courses of Russian as a foreign language will be opened in Tanzania, and in winter, face-to-face teaching will start in Zimbabwe.

The University is also developing activities in Africa to improve the qualifications of Russian language teachers. For example, in 2023, St Petersburg University has started unpaid training in the non-degree programme for 50 Russian language teachers from 14 African countries, including South Africa. Upon completion of the programme, students receive a certificate in the standard form. This project is carried out jointly with the Russkij Mir Foundation.

The centres created by St Petersburg University are an accessible opportunity for Africans to learn Russian. Moreover, they can attract talented international applicants to Russian universities. They can also perform a recruiting function to find high calibre experts from Africa with knowledge of Russian for further work related to Russia.

The considerable efforts of the Language Testing Centre at St Petersburg University to open Russian language courses in African countries have resulted in an increase in the number of applicants from the African region wishing to study at the University. Thus, more than a quarter of the students who will start studying on government-funded places at the Preparatory Courses of St Petersburg University in the 2023/2024 academic year are from African countries.

For reference: St Petersburg University has been implementing the non-degree programme ‘Preparatory Course (for International Citizens)’ for five years. Over these years, more than 500 students from 60 countries throughout the world have attended the courses in person and remotely.

Students from Africa take an active part in University life: both in scientific conferences and extracurricular activities. As part of the L Verbitskaya All-Russian creative contest of St Petersburg University, students from 62 countries, including Egypt, performed poems by Russian poets and songs with lyrics by Russian authors.

St Petersburg University online courses are chosen by students from all over the African continent

In March 2022, the Coursera platform unilaterally blocked access to the courses of Russian universities. At that time, about one million people were taking courses at St Petersburg University alone, with more than half of them being international students from more than 200 countries, including 27,230 students from Africa. The most popular courses with African students were courses in Japanese and other Oriental languages, medicine, programming and Russian.

Currently, the courses that were exclusively presented on the Coursera platform are hosted on the OpenEdu platform and are available to students from anywhere in the world, including students from Africa. The transfer of the content was carried out in order to preserve the access of international students to St Petersburg University educational resources, and the capabilities of the OpenEdu platform make it possible to train any number of students in any of the courses.

Scientific collaboration with African countries

St Petersburg University is engaged in scientific collaboration with such African countries as South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco. Among the areas of joint research are Earth sciences, Asian and African studies, law, mathematics, sociology, political sciences, journalism, medicine, international relations, chemistry, and biology. St Petersburg University has signed cooperation agreements and protocols on academic and research exchange with Ain Shams University (Egypt) and the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa).

As part of the quadripartite cooperation with Brazil, India and South Africa, and with the support of the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, a project to develop innovative functional bio-food packaging is currently being implemented under the supervision of Anastasia Penkova, Professor in the Department of Analytical Chemistry. Its aim is to develop an innovative environmentally friendly nanocomposite to create ‘smart’ biobased food packaging films, containing antimicrobial plant extracts to improve the safety and shelf life of food products.

Scientific collaboration is also underway to develop techniques to control phytoparasitic mites that pose a real biogenic threat to human agricultural activities. Since 2018, Philipp Chetverikov, Associate Professor in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology, together with his colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand has been working on the project ‘Genetic diversity of gall mites parasitising plants’.

The research project ‘Assessment of modern landscape transformations based on rock and soil transformation data: mineralogy, geochemistry, geography’ with the participation of Kirill Chistyakov, Director of the Institute of Earth Sciences, and Sofia Lesova, Professor in the Department of Physical Geography and Landscape Planning, was also implemented at St Petersburg University. The project made it possible to: develop the already established partnership between the Russian and South African project participants; and apply the long-standing experience of landscape-geographical research accumulated at the University to the study of landscapes using mineralogy, geochemistry, and geography. The results of the project helped to solve problems relevant to South Africa related to traditional issues of ethnomedicine, medical geography, and landscape planning.

Today, the number of St Petersburg University scholarly publications related to African studies is still incomparable with other major regions − 51 such papers over the last five years according to the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). Lomonosov Moscow State University has approximately the same number of publications for the same period (49 publications). A small gap separates the internationally oriented MGIMO University (41 publications) from the leading classical universities. Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University has 11 publications. However, there is a clear trend of increasing interest in this topic among researchers: the number of publications on Africa is gradually increasing every year. St Petersburg University will continue to develop joint research projects with countries on the African continent.

St Petersburg University branch in Egypt

The University is opening a branch in Cairo as part of the federal project of education export. According to Professor Pyotr Yablonsky, Vice-Rector for Medical Activities of St Petersburg University, the branch will be operational as early as October − with the start of the academic year in Egypt. He spoke about that at a press conference in the Russian News Agency TASS.

Students of the St Petersburg University branch in Cairo will study such academic programmes as General Medicine, Nursing and Dental Medicine. This will make it possible to reduce the shortage of medical personnel in the region. The programmes in Pharmacy and Physical Therapy are also being prepared for launch in the near future. Also, other programmes relevant to the Egyptian and Middle Eastern economies, including Economics and Management, are planned for the future.

The opening of the St Petersburg University branch in Egypt is an important step in the development of international cooperation of Russia’s oldest university. At present, the economy of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the fastest growing economy in the region. The need for educational services to train high calibre experts is therefore increasing.

Sergey Andryushin, Vice-Rector for International Affairs of St Petersburg University

‘The University’s initiative will strengthen the Russian-Egyptian strategic partnership and will have a positive impact on the regional economic and social development of the Arab Republic of Egypt,’ said Sergey Andryushin, Vice-Rector for International Affairs of St Petersburg University.

In the first year, it is planned to enrol more than 1,000 students with an annual increase in the number of students within the admission quota. All academic programmes in Cairo are headed by employees of St Petersburg University.

Graduates of St Petersburg University in Cairo will receive diplomas of St Petersburg University in accordance with the University’s educational standards and generally accepted international quality standards of higher education.