Report of the Roundtable on Capacity Building of Young Scholars

May 27, 2015

Emmanuel MutisyaUniversity of Tokyo/United Nations University

Global Research Council4th Annual Meeting, May 27 – 28, 2015, Tokyo, Japan

Building Education and Research Capacity in Africa

Roundtable Aims and Objectives

• Promote open, candid and stimulating exchanges between young researchers, and funding organization representatives on ways to promote research and education capacity building in the area of sustainable development by: – Providing an open and informal platform for exchanging views

on issues of critical concern to the GRC - capacity building of young researchers

– Helping young researchers extend their network to the funding community, and vice versa

1. Dr. Divine Fuh, Lecturer, University of Cape Town (South Africa)

2. Dr. Orleans Mfune, Lecturer, University of Zambia (Zambia)

3. Dr. Eino Mvula, CEO, NCRST (Namibia) 4. Dr. Julia Taguena Parga, Deputy Director General

for Scientific Development CONACYT5. Prof. Masafumi Nagao (UNU-IAS) 6. Dr. Aldo Stroebel (NRF, South Africa)

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Building Education and Research Capacity in Africa

Roundtable Presenters

• Generation Coefficient – sustainable development research requires continuous renewal. This is a critical role for the Next Generation Researchers.

• Sustainable development requires lifetime planning – building capacities through education and research is vital

• Unfavorable research funding models & partnerships – unequal funding consideration between senior and young remains a major challenge

• There is a need for African countries to allocate resources for capacity building

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Building Education and Research Capacity in AfricaIssues on capacity building of the next generation researchers

Capacity development is not always about social development of people but also about building capacities of institutions

• Young scholars would like to engage funders as partners not financial donors – There is a need to cooperatte in actual research formulation and implementation

• Collective collaboration – research funders should collectively fund collaborative joint research

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Building Education and Research Capacity in Africa

Concluding remarks

Young researchers are not researchers of tomorrow – we live in a society where seniors always tell young researchers that they are the research leaders of tomorrow – Young scholars should be treated as the researchers of today