At the International Convening on Higher Education Capacity Enhancement (held on 6 and 7 December 2022 alongside the World Science Forum in Cape Town, South Africa), a set of guidelines entitled, Designing and Implementing Impactful Post-PhD Support Programmes in Africa – Lessons learned from 10 African programmes was launched.
The guidelines were developed as an output from the peer-learning for emerging researcher’s knowledge and advancement (PERKA) project. They propose a tool for designing and implementing early-career researcher (ECR) training programmes for academic institutions, funding agencies, regional and continental entities, and other stakeholders.
The International Convening, which was attended by more than 100 delegates, facilitated discussions that reaffirmed some of the challenges that ECRs face, as documented in the guidelines, and consolidated the learnings of ECR development across Africa.
A communiqué, which documents the discussions and recommendations emerging from the high-level convening, has been published. This communiqué has been shared with stakeholders who attended the convening, including policymakers, academic institution heads, and research funders.
PERKA was a joint participatory research project focusing on support provided to early-career researchers in the post-PhD phase in Africa. Funded jointly by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, the project was implemented in collaboration with the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa.
The purpose of PERKA was to identify, analyse, document, and share the key lessons learned from CCNY’s investment in post-PhD support programmes in Africa. PERKA adopted a collaborative, participatory peer-learning approach to document and investigate partnership models for post-PhD support in Africa. For more information visit https://www.up.ac.za/peer-learning-for-emerging-researchers-knowledge-and-advancement-perka-program