William Kalema sometimes calls Sudan more than he calls his parents.

The Weinberg senior has spent two years working to bring leaders from Sudan’s South Kordofan region to Northwestern for a six-week fellowship titled “The Buffett Center’s Capacity Building Good Governance Fellowship.” The project, funded by Humanity United, would not have developed without Kalema, faculty and staff members who worked on the project said.

“There have been times when we didn’t think it was possible,” Kalema said.

Kalema’s interest in the South Kordofan region was piqued when he worked at an internship in Kampala, Uganda in 2007. While working on a report for the International Law Institute, Kalema focused on the region and the impact of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, a set of resolutions passed in an effort to end civil war in Sudan.

As part of his internship, Kalema began interviewing leaders in the legislative process for his reports. He said civil war left a vacuum in leadership in the region, and many leaders lacked the opportunities to govern effectively.

“I realized that there was this need to build capacity for peace in the region,” Kalema said.

When he got back to campus, then-sophomore Kalema contacted faculty, administrators, fellow students and Ken Spear, then-deputy country representative for Sudan in the Office of Transition Initiatives at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He said he wanted to use NU’s resources to address the problems in Sudanese leadership.

To advance the project, Kalema teamed up with The Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, and Prof. John Hagan, who said he had already done extensive research on Sudan. Hagan, chairman of the sociology department, said Kalema was a “unique undergraduate student.” The program Kalema proposed was promising; the problem was funding the project, Hagan said.

“We weren’t too optimistic about it,” he said. “I thought it would be a difficult thing to bring off. William’s a very compelling person and a very organized young man, and he convinced me that we could do it, so I lent my name to it.”

Kalema worked to fund the project with help from NU’s Office of Foundation Relations.

Though he wrote the grant proposals himself, he also received help from four graduate students in political science and advice from Sarah Fodor, NU’s director of foundation relations, he said.

“We persisted to get funding,” Kalema said. “It was two years of sweat. The funding is just one aspect of persisting.”

It is rare for Foundation Relations to work in cooperation with undergraduates, and foundations generally do not fund undergraduate projects, Fodor said.

Fodor said Kalema’s project is the first undergraduate project she has seen funded in 12 years.

“William was so driven and persistent and had already made so many connections … he was able to get support,” Fodor said. “William did, as far as I could tell, the lion’s share of the work. This would not have happened without him, but it helps to also have faculty support and administrative support.”

The program also focused on selection of candidates. The fellows in the program had to be key leaders with a strong command of English, Kalema said.

The fellows said the six-week program, which began last week, had been busy but rewarding. Tia Tutu Tutu Kafi, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement commissioner for Lagawa County, said “all this achievement we are taking back” to Sudan was because of Kalema’s work. At the conclusion of the fellowship, the five leaders will present an action plan to tackle the problems facing Sudan, Kalema said. They will travel to Washington D.C. to visit think tanks.

Kalema said he is concentrating on this year’s program before looking ahead.

“My focus is on making sure it’s a knockout,” he said.[email protected]