Six chapters — from an old Akan saying, to the problem we address, to the values that hold everything else in place. Scroll to follow the journey.
There is an old Akan saying: the one who has travelled far sees more than the one who simply climbs a tall tree. It captures something important about the relationship between lived experience, structured inquiry, and the capacity to act wisely on what one knows.
The Foundation takes its name from Dr. Eric Nii Amu Okotokata Dodoo-Amoo, trained in theoretical economics at Peking University and shaped by more than fifteen years of applied work in Ghana's public development finance space — spanning the Ministry of Finance, bilateral negotiations with Chinese institutions, and engagement with multilateral platforms. He is at once a practitioner who has structured real financing agreements, and a scholar who understands why certain financing models succeed where others fail.
The Foundation exists to channel that accumulated knowledge into something more durable than any single government posting could sustain.
Africa's engagement with China as a development partner has grown enormously over two decades — but the intellectual infrastructure needed to understand, evaluate, and shape that engagement has not kept pace. Decisions on concessional financing, infrastructure debt, and technology transfer are too often made without rigorous, Africa-grounded analysis.
At the same time, Ghana and the broader sub-region continue to lose real human potential to financial exclusion at the tertiary level. Students who qualify academically for competitive programmes frequently cannot pursue them — because tuition, accommodation, and living costs remain beyond family means. Opportunity follows money rather than aptitude.
Both problems are addressable. The ODA Foundation addresses them together — on the premise that an institution serious about development must practise what it researches.
The ODA Foundation is established to advance knowledge at the intersection of development economics, international economic relations, and new structural transformation theory — with a sustained focus on China–Africa engagement — and to translate that knowledge into concrete support for human capital development through scholarship for deserving students who lack financial access to higher education.
The mandate is deliberately dual. A foundation that produces research without any social programme risks becoming a think-tank whose outputs circulate only among those already positioned to benefit. A scholarship programme without a research function risks being philanthropic in form but not in impact. The ODA Foundation holds both functions in tension, expecting each to enrich the other.
An Africa whose engagement with the global economy — and with China in particular — is shaped by Africans who are analytically equipped, intellectually self-reliant, and morally grounded; and where talent, wherever it is born, has a genuine path to realizing its potential.
This vision is neither utopian nor distant. It names a condition practically achievable within a generation, if the right institutions exist to support it. The ODA Foundation intends to be one such institution — modest in size to begin with, but serious in purpose and rigorous in method.
The Foundation conducts independent, policy-relevant research on development finance, structural transformation, and China–Africa relations; convenes scholars, practitioners, and policymakers across institutional boundaries; and provides scholarship support for academically exceptional students who lack the means to pursue higher education — building, across both functions, the human and intellectual capital Africa's long-term development requires.
These organise the Foundation's approach to everything it does.
Findings are shared honestly, including when they complicate prevailing assumptions. The Foundation does not produce advocacy dressed as analysis.
Scholarship must connect to the real conditions facing African governments, communities, and households. Abstraction is a tool, not an end.
Talent is distributed evenly across society; opportunity is not. The scholarship programme actively works to correct that imbalance.
Development is generational. The Foundation resists short-cycle outputs and prizes work that will matter in ten or twenty years.
Explore how the mandate becomes practice across our two tracks.
See the Programmes →