In October 2009, University of Cape Coast (UCC) in close collaboration with its Chinese partner university, Hunan City University (HCU), submitted a proposal to establish a Confucius Institute (CI) at UCC. What follows was a revised and updated version of that proposal; the intention, as before, was to submit the proposal for consideration by Hanban, the Confucius Institute Headquarters in Beijing, under the kind sponsorship and guidance of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Accra, Ghana.
After this genesis initiation, Department of English under the umbrella Faculty of Art at UCC was proposed to house Confucius Institute at UCC. The English Department also started on positive ground by running Liberal Course in Chinese Proficiency, which was available to students across all discipline.
This programme was suited to serve as a Model Site for the instruction of Chinese language and culture.Since September 2008, there has been a healthy traffic of faculty, administrators and students between the partner institutions. In 2009, UCC received two lecturers Mr Xiang Li (music lecturer) and Ms. Xinhua Huang (computer science lecturer) arrived at UCC campus in February 2009 and taught for one year. In the following year, as a way to prepare for the coming of the Confucius Institute, UCC reciprocated by sponsoring two lecturers to HCU to study Chinese language and culture. Since then, a Chinese Language Centre has been operating as a Chinese Proficiency course in the Department of English under the hand of a Chinese language tutor sponsored from HCU. Between January 2013 to June 2016, two Chinese lecturers Mr. Zhou Tong and Ms. Rong Li from HCU featured the teaching of Chinese Language and Proficiency courses under the auspices of HCU and UCC. Aside regular Board meetings between UCC and HCU to prove the readiness of UCC to have CI fully established on the shores of Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana, the success of this project was also upgraded to another level when UCC students placed second and third in the 2014 Inter-University Chinese bridge contest held at University of Ghana (Legon.).
Confucius Institute which is currently functioning and running free outreach Chinese Language program to Students, Staff and the University community at large was officially inaugurated in 3rd June, 2016.To date there is only one other Confucius Institute in Ghana, at Legon which in addition sum up to two CI in Ghana. In the rest of Africa there are only handfuls. These are Egypt: Suez Canal University; Kenya: Nairobi University; Rwanda: Kigali Institute of Education; and South Africa; Stellenbosch University.