British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Recommendations

Institutional foundations – improving structures, systems and governance

Institutional structures and relationships

• R1: African universities should work to establish central research management offices, or support existing units, with a responsibility to manage and provide support to the full range of activities which surround research, from developing strategies, mapping needs, and disseminating funding information, to assisting researchers to put together grant applications, and to manage the financial and legal aspects of contracts. Institutions seeking to develop their own research management structures will benefit from the existing regional research management associations, such as the Southern African Research and Innovation Management Association (SARIMA) and its West African equivalent (WARIMA).
• R2: African universities and research associations should recognise that libraries play a critical role in research, and that stronger relationships between researchers and libraries are needed, to agree priorities, identify available resources, and to assist in the collection and dissemination of African research.
• R3: African universities and university associations, via their staff development or human resources departments, should ensure that leadership and strategic management capacity is built within institutions. Specialist training courses and attachments or exchange visits to other universities may be valuable. Other key staff will require training in personnel and research and consultancy management to ensure strong leadership at all levels.

Consultancy

• R4: African universities should seek to incorporate consultancy formally within departmental research programmes and in doing so make it more attractive for academics to contract their expertise through their institutions rather than independently. Donors should encourage consultancy contracts to be undertaken in this way, and avoid contracting academic expertise on an individual basis.

Incentives for research

• R5: African universities should establish performance management systems, linked to appropriate reward and incentive mechanisms, to encourage research, supervision and mentoring, publishing and policy or other external consultancy work.
• R6: Donors should consider including a contribution towards salary costs for a principal investigator as part of any research funding programme.This would enable researchers to focus properly on research, and enable universities to cover teaching replacement costs.

Monitoring and information

• R7: African university and research associations should work with universities to gather better data on higher education and research at national, regional and continental level, including the number of doctorates being produced, levels of research funding and where it is spent, university specialisation, and existing initiatives which support research and postgraduate training.

National agendas

• R8: African universities and university associations should engage their governments and regional and continental bodies, to help them to appreciate the value of research and the risk that continued expansion poses to quality within higher education. In doing so they should advocate the design of national frameworks for research and postgraduate study, seek to initiate a dialogue on funding formulae for higher education, and ensure that obstructive mobility and visa arrangements are addressed to enable African academics to travel more freely within the continent.

   

Communities and networks – forging collaboration within Africa

Research networks and associations

• R9: African universities must recognise, through their research policies and budgetary allocations, and through academic appraisal mechanisms, that active participation in disciplinary or subject-based associations is essential to a successful academic career, and vital to encourage greater inter-African collaboration at national, regional and continental levels.
• R10: Donors should support disciplinary or subject-based associations to enable them to develop long term research strategies, and provide funding to enable researchers to explore emerging ideas arising from these.
• R11: UK research associations and networks should seek to strengthen links with their counterparts in Africa, as a step towards identifying where shared, longer-term research agendas might be possible, where research programmes might be effectively linked and where joint conferences might be held. Specifically, UK associations could offer support for African colleagues to attend conferences in the UK, or for UK academics to attend the conferences of African associations.

Communities of research excellence

• R12: African universities and donors should explore the development of inter-institutional research communities, as the basis for collaboration in research and postgraduate training in specific disciplines or subjects.The process should seek to learn from the experiences of existing collaborations, and should take an holistic view of research, recognising the roles of research management offices, staff development departments and university libraries.
• R13: Donors should collectively consider the levels of research funding which are currently available to African academics, to ensure an appropriate ‘ladder’ of funding, enabling initial ideas to be explored, and subsequently developed into larger scale research projects.They should recognise that large scale projects take time to plan, and should incorporate proposal development funding to allow proper design and planning.

Publishing

• R14: African universities and university and research associations should consider establishing an academic publishing network in order to collect and peer review new work and prepare it for publication. Online publishing and print-on-demand technologies should be explored to enable research to be more widely disseminated across Africa by circumventing the problems and expense of warehousing and delivery.
• R15: African universities should support university libraries to develop digital repositories of theses and dissertations in order to improve access to African research. Further development of the Association of African Universities’ Database of African Theses and Dissertations may represent the best way to do this.

Investing in individuals – the early research career

 

Doctoral training

• R16: African universities,African university and research associations,donors and UK universities and research associations should collectively explore opportunities to develop new modes of PhD training, drawing on split-site and distance learning approaches and making use of summer schools or study centres, delivered by African or UK researchers, or retired academics. Collaborative approaches at national or regional levels, including shared postgraduate schools, should be considered. Doctoral training should be firmly embedded within wider research strategies and funding programmes.
• R17: UK universities hosting split-site or other African scholars should investigate the possibility of providing continued access to electronic library resources during the periods in which a scholar is based at their home institution, in order to bridge the resource gaps between home and overseas study phases and to ease the transition into postdoctoral study when scholars return home.

Supervision and mentoring

• R18: African universities should prioritise supervision and mentoring, encourage senior academics to support their junior colleagues, and ensure that they are appropriately rewarded for this. UK and African universities and scholarship agencies should ensure that scholars are effectively trained in research skills, the writing of grant proposals, and in publishing their work. Existing initiatives such as AuthorAid offer valuable mechanisms to do this. Where existing staff are over-stretched, retired academics might be employed specifically to mentor postgraduates and early career researchers.
• R19: African universities should seek to maintain regular contact with staff training overseas, make an effort to understand their needs and interests, and ensure that they are deployed properly, effectively reintegrated, and able to continue their research on their return. Teaching loads and administrative duties will need to be moderated. Staff development departments should be involved, in cooperation with academic departments.

Postdoctoral research

• R20: African universities, through staff development departments, should work to define proper postdoctoral career structures, including research fellowship or equivalent positions. These should ensure that researchers are granted the time to turn doctoral theses into publishable work, and ensure that suitable training programmes are developed for early career researchers, matched to appropriate external opportunities.
• R21: UK universities and university and research associations should lobby UK government to ensure that African scholars funded to visit the UK are able to do so with greater ease. Major UK scholarship and fellowship schemes, particularly those supported by UK public funding, should be officially recognised and immigration officials provided with details of accredited schemes and programmes.
• R22: UK universities, scholarship agencies and other doctoral funding bodies should seek to support the continued development of their returning alumni. Specifically they should consider a hybrid programme for early career postdoctoral researchers which would enable them to return to their UK institutions on an annual basis over a five-year period, in order to continue existing work and to develop new collaborations, in a manner compatible with their maintaining a full time position in an African institution.

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