Features
Female international students in Finnish universities
Of late, I have been thinking about the number of female international students in universities in Finland.
My thoughts have not merely been based on the number of international students pursuing a programme in a Finnish university.
Rather, I have been thinking largely about what percentage of the total number of international students in universities in Finland are females and are originally from African countries.
Women’s voting and Finland as a pioneer
I have been thinking along these lines of late when I started a course on gender issues.
The course is actually on feminist approaches to developing country researching, and my thoughts have been on opportunities on Finland for female students originally from African countries.
Finland holds a strong view of women’s potentials. The records say that in 1906, Finland became the first country in the world where women exercised their voting rights.
This was as a result of the passing of the Parliamentary Act that year, which gave unrestricted rights to both women and men to vote and stand for elections.
Actually, Finland and the other Nordic countries encourage women’s independence and strong traits.
Many years ago, I took a course, ‘The strong Nordic woman’ (or something like that) where I learnt much about Finnish women’s key roles in the household especially around the nineteenth century or so.
The gender of admissions
As I have already mentioned it was as a result of discussions on gender that thoughts about the representation of female international student have come up strongly to me.
Largely, I have been considering the percentage of female African students in Finnish universities.
Actually, I do not have any specific number of international students, that is, originally from African countries currently enrolled in Finland.
Of course, it is very likely that female international students who are originally from African countries would be less as compared with others from other parts of the world.
Encouraging potential female international students
This piece is dedicated to all the potential female international students.
I encourage prospective international applicants to take Finland’s highly liberal policy of encouraging women to be independent.
I think there is so much to gain from that.
Hence, potential female international students are being encouraged to find more information from the faculties or departments and the programmes that they are interested in studying in Finnish universities.
Through this, they are likely to be able to achieve their goal of furthering their studies as well as being empowered. Thank you.
By Perpetual Crentsil
[The writer is a Ghanaian lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Finland]
One of the issues we have been grappling with as a nation is corruption, and it has had such a devastating effect on our national development. I have been convinced that until morality becomes the foundation upon which our governance system is built, we can never go forward as a nation.
Our traditional practices, which have shaped our cultural beliefs, have always espoused values that have kept us along the straight and the narrow and have preserved our societies since ancient times.
These are values that frown on negative habits like stealing, cheating, greediness, selfishness, etc. Our grandparents have told us stories of societies where stealing was regarded as so shameful that offenders, when caught, have on a number of instances committed suicide.
In fact, my mother told me of a story where a man who was living in the same village as her mother (my grandmother), after having been caught stealing a neighbour’s cockerel, out of shame committed suicide on a mango tree. Those were the days that shameful acts were an abomination.
Tegare worship, a traditional spiritual worship during which the spirit possesses the Tegare Priest and begins to reveal secrets, was one of the means by which the society upheld African values in the days of my grandmother and the early childhood days of my mother.
Those were the days when the fear of being killed by Tegare prevented people from engaging in anti-social vices. These days, people sleeping with other people’s wives are not uncommon.
These wrongful behaviour was not countenanced at all by Tegare. One was likely going to lose his life on days that Tegare operates, and so unhealthy habits like coveting your neighbour’s wife was a taboo.
Stealing of other people’s farm produce, for instance, could mean certain death or incapacitation of the whole or part of the body in the full glare of everybody. People realised that there were consequences for wrongdoing, and this went a long way to motivate the society to adhere to right values.
Imagine a President being sworn into office and whoever administers the oath says, “Please say this after me: I, Mr. …., do solemnly swear by God, the spirits of my ancestors and the spirits ruling in Ghana, that should I engage in corrupt acts, may I and my family become crippled, may madness become entrenched in my family, may incurable sicknesses and diseases be my portion and that of my family, both immediate and extended.”
Can you imagine a situation where a few weeks afterwards the President goes to engage in corrupt acts and we hear of his sudden demise or incapacitation and confessing that he engaged in corrupt acts before passing or before the incapacitation—and the effect it will have on his successor? I believe we have to critically examine this option to curb corruption.
My grandmother gave me an eyewitness account of one such encounter where a woman died instantly after the Tegare Priest had revealed a wrong attitude she had displayed during the performance on one of the days scheduled for Tegare spirit manifestation.
According to her story, the Priest, after he had been possessed by the spirit, declared that for what the woman had done, he would not forgive her and that he would kill. Instantly, according to my grandmother, the lady fell down suddenly and she died—just like what happened to Ananias and his wife Sapphira in Acts Chapter 5.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
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BY ROBERT EKOW GRIMMOND-THOMPSON
