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]