Building interdisciplinary research capacity in African universities: insights from the Sentinel project

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research has emerged as a suitable research approach for addressing
complex global development challenges, however, its applicability is still limited within
the African research context. To this note, collaborative arrangements between North and
South based universities and institutions developed an interdisciplinary project called
“Social and Environmental Trade-offs in African Agriculture (Sentinel)’ to build capacity
of African and UK researchers and their institutions to co-develop interdisciplinary
research on the impacts, risks, and trade-offs within and between socio-economic and
environmental dimensions of different agricultural development pathways. Building
capacity for interdisciplinary research requires an understanding of the research context
of African universities to support planning for capacity building activities. This paper
provides insights on the assessment of research capacity of African universities through
a cross-sectional survey of Principals and Deans who attended the RUFORUM Annual
General Meeting in Lilongwe, Malawi in 2017. A survey questionnaire consisting of both
open-ended and structured questions was administered to a randomly selected sample
of 53 respondents. Quantitative data was analysed using SPSS (V.21) while qualitative
data was analysed using thematic analysis. The major themes were summarised into
frequencies and/or percentage of the overall number of responses for each open-ended
question. Results showed that African universities are engaged in international networks,
conduct collaborative research, and take a strategic approach to management, reward
faculty for publications, participating in conferences and professional organisations. The
study recommends strengthening research support, supervision and mentorship structures
and that universities need to evaluate their existing capacities and map out strategic areas
of development