Rising to the challenge – impact for early career researchers in 2024

Building early careers – new skills and community support

2024 has been a busy year for the INASP team, so this is a good opportunity to celebrate the work of our colleagues and partners across the world.

Our AuthorAID programme – led and facilitated by a team of Global South experts – has enabled over 10,000 early career researchers to engage with and learn from their peers, forge new partnerships, and strengthen critical skills.

Our open course in research writing has continued to assist researchers to navigate their way to publication, attracting 5000 participants. Our new course in engaged research, designed to equip researchers to navigate their research towards genuine societal impact, not just academic publication, is bringing researchers together to understand co-design and co-production with communities and policy makers.

Image: Christian Opoku-Kwarteng from Ghana credits AuthorAID as a “game-changer” for his career. Read more here.

Our community hubs, including a pan-African systematic reviews group, and a Nigeria hub collaboratively-led by researchers from across the country, have offered a regular learning programme of courses and webinars. We’ve run a bespoke digital learning programme for 247 early career marine scientists spanning the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, in partnership with the ACU, and designed and delivered by experts from our global network.

As part of our efforts to make learning more flexible, to fit early career researchers’ busy lives, we’ve developed a new series of bite-size learning videos – developed and produced by a team of Southern scholars which have been viewed over 13,000 times.

Image: our most viewed learning video, recorded by Nafisa Elehamer from Sudan and edited by Bolu Aderonmou from Nigeria

And moving from digital to in-person, we were delighted to work with ESSA to provide a training programme in grant writing for a cohort of education researchers, delivered by colleagues from Ghana and Uganda.

New partnerships to increase support for African early career researchers in open science and more

It’s also been a year of building new partnerships. We launched a new partnership with the Templeton World Charity Foundation in September, that will enable us to offer deeper support to East African researchers in open science practices. And as the year draws to a close we’re excited to have agreed a new programme of support for African early career researchers in partnership with Norad, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

Gender-responsive TVET to equip young women for digital industries in Nigeria

Returning to Nigeria, we’ve been proud to support Yaba College of Technology’s new girls’ education and skills initiative, supported by UNICEF and FCDO, to enable 5,200 young women to build skills for the digital economy in Lagos. Our training on gender-responsive pedagogy for the project’s trainers and mentors builds directly on learning from our TESCEA programme in East Africa and brought experts from Uganda and Tanzanian to support Nigerian colleagues.

Image: women and girls learning new IT and app development skills at Yaba College of Technology

Leveraging our expertise to support partners

Alongside our direct support to researchers, we’ve worked with:

• Ipsos Mori to complete an evaluation of partnership and capacity strengthening of the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team
• IDRC to provide research uptake support to East African research institutions working on women’s economic empowerment
• On Think Tanks to explore inequities in knowledge commissioning for economic policy, on behalf of Open Society Initiatives
• The Center for Global Development and Veredas Institute to explore opportunities for the G20 to drive progress in research publishing reform, building a new theory of change for science diplomacy efforts and contributing to the Think Tank stream of the Brazilian G20.

Building momentum towards publishing reform

In December we began a new phase of work on science diplomacy for open access, tracking the G20 to South Africa which takes the presidency for the coming year and joining discussions in Pretoria and Cape Town in December. We’ll be working with new team members to build the evidence base – aiming to lift the conversation to a higher level, where decisions are needed by policy leaders to unlock progress.

Serving communities and leading change

As 2024 draws to a close, we wish our partners and colleagues across the world a restful break and look forward to a bright year ahead. Together we’ll continue to equip Southern researchers and educators to lead change and to position their expertise and to serve their societies and communities.