Senior Kimberly Everett of Semmes, Ala., a member of the University Honors Program, is the first University of Alabama at Birmingham student to receive a Boren Fellowship. The award will further her research on the effect of Chinese direct investment on the sisal industry in rural Tanzania. Everett is specifically looking at the extent to which Chinese state-owned and funded farms inhibit small scale Tanzanian farmers from entering and succeeding in the profitable sisal industry.
Boren Fellowships support study and research in areas of the world that are critical to U.S. interests. They provide up to $30,000 to U.S. graduate students who wish to add an international and language component to their graduate education. Boren Fellowships send students to Africa, Asia, Central & Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Everett, an economics major in the College of Arts and Sciences, plans to learn Swahili and work in the Department of State as a Foreign Service officer. She would like to be involved with policy development. Everett went to China for a year on the Boren undergraduate scholarship program in 2010. She was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar in 2011 and became the first UAB student awarded the Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship in 2012.