“It takes more than a fellowship program”: reflections on capacity strengthening for health systems research in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) experiences an acute dearth of well-trained and skilled researchers. This dearth constrains the region’s capacity to identify and address the root causes of its poor social, health, development, and other outcomes. Building sustainable research capacity in SSA requires, among other things, locally led and run initiatives that draw on existing regional capacities as well as mutually beneficial global collaborations. This paper describes a regional research capacity strengthening initiative—the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (ADDRF) program. This Africa-based and African-led initiative has emerged as a practical and tested platform for producing and nurturing research leaders, strengthening university-wide systems for quality research training and productivity, and building a critical mass of highly-trained African scholars and researchers. The program deploys different interventions to ensure the success of fellows. These interventions include research methods and scientific writing workshops, research and reentry support grants, post-doctoral research support and placements, as well as grants for networking and scholarly conferences attendance. Across the region, ADDRF graduates are emerging as research leaders, showing signs of becoming the next generation of world-class researchers, and supporting the transformations of their home-institutions. While the contributions of the ADDRF program to research capacity strengthening in the region are significant, the sustainability of the initiative and other research and training fellowship programs on the continent requires significant investments from local sources and, especially, governments and the private sector in Africa. The ADDRF experience demonstrates that research capacity building in Africa is possible through innovative, multifaceted interventions that support graduate students to develop different critical capacities and transferable skills and build, expand, and maintain networks that can sustain them as scholars and researchers.

Development of the Rehabilitation Health Policy, Systems, and Services Research Field: Quantitative Analyses of Publications over Time (1990–2017) and across Country Type

“…While we found a significant growing trend in the portion of the country-specific Rehabilitation HPSSR publications that were focused on LMICs(up to 13% in 2017),a still higher preponderance of rehabilitation HPSSR is likely needed, especially in LMICs; transformational rather than incremental improvements would be required to address this gap. Capacity would need to be created, for example, in developing a research workforce with the means, focus, and capabilities to implement a Rehabilitation HPSSR agenda worldwide [10,22,[67][68][69], including with a special focus on LMICs [70][71][72].…”

Increasing collaborative research output between early-career health researchers in Africa: lessons from the CARTA fellowship program

“…The collaborative publications between CARTA fellows suggest that this skill is being developed in some of the CARTA fellows. The various components of the CARTA program that promote collaboration appear to be related to the research capabilities of the CARTA fellows, a view shared by other authors [1,28].…”

“…Africa requires well trained and networked researchers, capable of responding to challenges in public and population health [1][2][3]. Interdisciplinary collaborative research is particularly essential for public and population health to address its complexity, to deal with the multifaceted determinants of health and to describe and understand the local context in which interventions are proposed or evaluated [4,5].…”

Implementation, Outputs, and Cost of a National Operational Research Training in Rwanda

“…Training and mentorship in core biomedical research knowledge and skills are essential for building individual and institutional research capacity in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) [1][2][3]. Capacitated LMIC researchers can produce research that is relevant to national priorities, link research with policy and practice, and negotiate equitable international research collaborations [1,4,5]. Efforts to improve national health research capacity in LMICs, led by academic institutions and nongovernmental organizations, have steadily increased [6][7][8].…”