Paper short abstract:

Over recent decades, the development of Health Research Capacity Strengthening initiatives such as DELTAS Africa has been the new policy paradigm to address this gap. However, this new approach is not well understood in the literature.

Paper long abstract:

Endogenous capacities for scientific research in Africa are limited. This is particularly the case for the health sector, where sub-Saharan Africa is poorly represented in both numbers of scientists and research outputs per capita. This fact contributes to lower participation of the sub-Saharan African region in global health policy research and discussions, as well as the influence of its researchers in setting the global health policy agenda and priorities. Over recent decades, the development of Health Research Capacity Strengthening initiatives such as DELTAS Africa has been the new policy paradigm to address this gap. However, this new approach is not well understood in the literature. There is still limited evidence as to how consortia membership enhances the capacity of African research institutions to provide quality research training programmes to African researchers. This study aims at contributing to filling this knowledge gap.

The overall aim of this study is to explore to what extent the membership to Consortia leads to the improvement of the capacities of African higher education and research institutions to support researchers' training.

The study is carried out through case studies conducted in institutions from two countries hosting DELTAS consortia and illustrating two contrasting linguistic and political contexts in sub-Saharan Africa (Anglophone and Francophone Africa). The focus of the case studies is the researcher training programmes provided by the selected institutions belonging to the DELTAS network. Data collection is done via semi-structured interviews, site observations and documents reviews.