The Ngaoundéré‑Anthropos Programme is a pioneering effort between two peripheral universities, the University of Ngaoundéré and the University of Tromsø to enhance the specificities of their research and teaching competence in order to offer indigenous based knowledge to the international academic community. The specificities are due to the importance given to the intelligibility of the knowledge in the local contexts.
Through collaboration one tries to extend anddefine new parameters of research so that the production of knowledge and of competence can actually be an exchange and not a transfer phenomenon.
The almost twenty years that we have been working together have enabled us to test our ideas. We feel that we have managed to create a relationship which has the character of a collaboration instead of aid. The initiatives that are being taken on both sides of the Anthropos‑programme witness the needs that one feels for learning, for comments, reactions and inspiration. In our two Universities and regional environments we are now observing a flourishing interest in the development of knowledge about local culture and social changes. We are observing a genuine and original tie between the local socio‑political processes and the questions that are raised by the young researchers and their supervisors in Adamawa and Northern Cameroon. We have also had the opportunity to observe a cross‑fertilization generated through the collaboration between Cameroonian Anthropos‑students and students of human and social sciences in Tromsø.
The last period with NUFU funding ended in 2006. Still there is a comprehensive collaboration between Tromsø and Ngaoundéré, and since 2006 with University of Bamako, Mali, and since 2009 with University of Maroua, Cameroon.