"With a huge and growing population of young people who see higher education as a pathway to economic and professional success, in contexts where governments provide very limited resources, African universities face many challenges in creating platforms that enable outstanding research," said the Watson Institute's Africa Initiative Director, Daniel Jordan Smith. "A robust research capacity depends on highly trained Ph.D.s," Smith added.
The Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) — a partnership between eight African universities, four African research institutions and eight non-African partner institutions — was formed in 2008 to support the development of a vibrant African university Ph.D. training program capable of producing world-class multidisciplinary research.
CARTA is jointly led by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Kenya and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa. Brown University is one of the consortium's eight non-African partner institutions, and the only one in the United States.
Smith, who coordinates Brown's partnership with the consortium, stated that "CARTA's overall goal is to increase use of cross-institutional collaboration to build the research capacity of doctoral students, postdoctoral students and junior faculty, and to strengthen university systems to lead multidisciplinary research in Africa." According to CARTA, “The collaborative initiative enhances the capacity of African universities to create conducive research environments by supporting junior faculty members to undertake their doctoral training locally and to become internationally recognized research leaders.”
Each year, students from the eight partner African universities apply to be fellows in the program. CARTA welcomes applications from any discipline, so long as the research aims to contribute to public and population health issues in Africa. CARTA has funded research in a wide variety of disciplines, including public health, population studies, biomedical fields and the social sciences.
Brown's role in the consortium, according to Smith, is to mentor junior African researchers. "The program has a four-phase set of interventions for the fellows," explained Smith. "They call them joint advanced seminars, which bring together all the fellows."
"The first phase," said Smith, "is when they are defining and proposing their research project. The second is when they are analyzing data. The third supports writing their dissertations. And the last phase is professionalization, including transforming their research findings into potential publications." Participating Brown faculty members provide mentoring and advice at each phase.
"Faculty from the African universities and the non-African partners attend these seminars and serve as mentors to the students," said Smith. However, the mentoring activities of Brown faculty extend beyond participation in the seminars.
"What I do," said Smith, "is mobilize a small pool of Brown faculty members who provide timely feedback to the fellows on a regular basis." This includes giving feedback on drafts of grant proposals and research methodology, as well as reviewing drafts of dissertation chapters and articles for publication.
