The importance of mentorship and collaboration for scientific capacity-building and capacity-sharing: perspectives of African scientists

Abstract

Long-term goals for capacity-building in Africa centres around building a self-sufficient scientific community, however there is a lack of research on the interactions that are needed to make up a thriving academic community or the steps needed to realise such a goal. Through interviews with researchers supported by a capacity-building initiative, we have characterised their interactions with other scientists and the impact that these have on capacity-building. This has revealed a wide range of interactions that have not been captured by traditional bibliometric studies of collaboration and shown that a substantial amount of intra-African collaboration is taking place. This collaboration allowed the researchers to share capacity with their colleagues and this could provide an alternative to, or supplement, traditional North-South capacity-building. We have shown that this capacity-sharing can enable capacity to spill over from capacity-building programmes to the broader scientific community. Furthermore, researchers are deliberately hastening this capacity-sharing through training or mentoring others outside of their capacity-building initiative, including those from more resource-poor groups. To understand how capacity-building initiatives can harness the power of these interactions, we investigated how interactions between researchers originated, and found that collaborations tended to be formed around pre-existing networks, with researchers collaborating with previous colleagues, or contacts formed through their mentors or consortium activities. Capacity-building organisations could capitalise on this through actions such as expanding mentorship schemes but should also ensure that researchers are not limited to pre-established networks but have exposure to a changing and growing pool of expertise. As interactions continue to move online since the appearance of COVID-19 this will present opportunities for new interaction patterns to develop. This study highlights the need to develop new metrics for collaboration that will take into account these new modes of interaction and the full range of interactions that make up a scientific community.