The University of Ghana has been awarded a new grant of US$2,940,000 (two million nine hundred and forty thousand US Dollars) by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to support doctoral education and early career faculty research capacity development. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has been a major partner in UG’s aggressive agenda for faculty development, which is focusing on PhD training and enhancing faculty capacity to deliver high quality research. Under the Corporation’s Next Generation of Academics in Africa Programme (NGAA), the Corporation has supported, since 2010, an extensive faculty development agenda that has benefited 80 PhD and 86 MPhil students so far. This has generated a huge momentum and created a cohort of students with a desire to remain in academia and to excel in research productivity; a new brand of next generation academics, with a new way of thinking, new attitudes and new leadership skills.
The new project, Building a New Generation of Academics in Africa (BANGA-Africa), seeks to build on what has been achieved so far, to build the emerging academics trained under the NGAA into a new generation of academics with new vision and new research innovations and resourcefulness to take UG to greater heights. BANGA- Africa will consolidate UG’s achievements through support for post-doctoral activities, further enhance the proportion of PhD holders on UG faculty by supporting additional doctoral training and improve doctoral products in West Africa by strengthening the UG - PADA
When contacted for her reaction to this latest boost to the PhD training at UG, Professor Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu, who developed the proposal, and obviously elated, acknowledged all the PhD students and early career faculty, who she said gave their time for the many consultative meetings that preceded the proposal development, and whose expressed needs provided the focus for BANGA-Africa.
Professor Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu
The immediate goal of BANGA-Africa is to contribute to the attainment of a critical mass of PhD holders on University of Ghana faculty to further improve doctoral training and enhance quality and volume of research outputs from UG. The project has three objectives, namely:
i. To consolidate research capacity of early career UG faculty in order to enhance their research productivity and ability to contribute effectively to global knowledge generation.
ii. To further enhance UG faculty strength and improve the university’s capability to deliver high quality research and graduate training.
iii. To strengthen the UG Pan-African Doctoral Academy (UG-PADA) into a strong centre for PhD scholarship, contributing effectively to African voice in global academic discourse and African nations’ development agenda.
The activities outlined for implementation over the three year project duration include, defining and arranging post-doctoral activities for early career faculty, supporting doctoral training for MPhil candidates trained under the NGAA project and proactively encouraging participation in international conferences to disseminate research results. Other activities will focus on strengthening ability of the early career faculty to do research and publish their results by providing competitive seed research grants and strategic, critical equipment to key units, enhance publications by providing academic writing training workshops and writing clinics, as well as strengthening key UG academic journals. The project will also ensure proper set-up of the new offices built by UG for the PADA, strengthen its operations and support participation of doctoral candidates from the West African sub-region in the PADA schools.
Ten specific outputs are expected from the implementation of the activities, including supporting at least 60 early career faculty for post-doctoral activities and 30 high performing MPhil graduates to undertake PhD studies. In the longer term, we expect that the implementation of the BANGA-Africa project will contribute to the attainment of a number of broader outcomes envisioned by the UG and outlined in its strategic plan.
