Capacity development for health research in Africa: experiences managing the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship Program

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Africa's progress depends on her capacity to generate, adapt, and use scientific knowledge to meet regional health and development needs. Yet, Africa's higher education institutions that are mandated to foster this capacity lack adequate resources to generate and apply knowledge, raising the need for innovative approaches to enhance research capacity. In this paper, we describe a newly-developed program to support PhD research in health and population sciences at African universities, the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (ADDRF) Program. We also share our experiences implementing the program. As health research capacity-strengthening in Africa continues to attract attention and as the need for such programs to be African-led is emphasized, our experiences in developing and implementing the ADDRF offer invaluable lessons to other institutions undertaking similar initiatives.

Related collections

Most cited references 1

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Most of our social scientists are not institution based… they are there for hire—Research consultancies and social science capacity for health research in East Africa

Daniel Wight (2008)

There is a serious shortage of senior African social scientists to lead health-related research in Africa. This is despite the existence of many African social science graduates, and decades of Northern funded research programmes intended to develop local capacity. To investigate the barriers to developing health social science research capacity in East Africa, 29 in-depth interviews, informal conversations and a group discussion were conducted with professionals in this field. Respondents’ explanations for inadequate social science research capacity primarily related to under-development and global economic inequalities. However, a recurrent theme was the predominance of individually contracted research consultancies. These seem to divert university staff from academic research, supporting colleagues and training the next generation of researchers, stunt the institutional capacity of university departments, restrict the sharing of research findings and perpetuate donors’ control of the research agenda. Although primarily due to macro-economic factors, limited research capacity in sub-Saharan Africa might be ameliorated by modifying the process by which much research is conducted. This exploratory study suggests that institutional research capacity might be strengthened if consultancy research were commissioned through institutions, rather than individuals, with the payment of substantial overheads.

0 comments Cited 14 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

All references

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Health Res Policy Syst

Title: Health Research Policy and Systems

Publisher: BioMed Central

ISSN (Electronic): 1478-4505

Publication date Collection: 2010

Publication date (Electronic): 29 June 2010

Volume: 8

Page: 21

Affiliations

[1 ]African Population and Health Research Center, 2nd Floor Shelter Afrique Centre, P.O. Box 10787-00100, Nairobi, Kenya

Article

Publisher ID: 1478-4505-8-21

DOI: 10.1186/1478-4505-8-21

PMC ID: 2907373

PubMed ID: 20587016

SO-VID: f1ccbf7b-28d1-4920-8527-f466c0353c37

License:

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

History

Date received : 17 September 2009

Date accepted : 29 June 2010

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Cited by 15

See all cited by

Most referenced authors 1

Daniel Wight

See all reference authors