Nairobi, Kenya · 2018 — The Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) continued its Phase II strategic cycle throughout 2018, supporting doctoral training and research capacity building in public and population health across sub-Saharan Africa. Established in 2008, CARTA has become one of the continent's most significant doctoral training initiatives, specifically designed to strengthen the capacity of African universities to produce world-class, multidisciplinary research.
During 2018, CARTA was actively operating under its Phase II (2016–2020) strategic framework, which focused on sustaining the production of a critical mass of well-trained African academics and institutionalising the CARTA model within partner universities.
A Consortium Model
CARTA is jointly led by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Kenya and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa. It functions through a consortium that brings together:
- Eight African partner universities across sub-Saharan Africa
- Four African research institutions providing complementary research infrastructure
- Eight non-African partner institutions offering international exposure and mentorship
The Joint Advanced Seminals
The signature component of the CARTA doctoral experience is the Joint Advanced Seminars (JASes) — a series of four phased residential seminars that fellows attend throughout their doctoral journey. These seminars provide rigorous training in research methods, critical thinking, and transferable skills.
The JAS structure is designed to complement rather than replace the fellows' home university doctoral programmes. By bringing fellows together from across the consortium's eight African universities, the seminars create a pan-African peer network that supports fellows through the isolation that often characterises doctoral study in under-resourced institutions.
Each seminar in the four-phase sequence builds on the previous one, taking fellows from foundational research methods through to dissertation defence preparation. The residential format allows for intensive, immersive learning that would be difficult to achieve through intermittent supervision alone.
Supporting Junior Faculty
CARTA's fellowship specifically targets junior faculty members at partner universities, rather than students who have not yet begun academic careers. This focus is deliberate: by supporting existing academics, CARTA aims to strengthen the research capacity of African universities from within, rather than producing graduates who may leave academia or the continent.
Fellows receive support for conference attendance, publication costs, and 'tutor exchange' programmes. The tutor exchange component is particularly innovative — it allows fellows to temporarily offload routine teaching responsibilities to colleagues, freeing them to focus on their doctoral research. This addresses a structural barrier in African universities where junior faculty often carry heavy teaching loads that leave little time for research.
Multidisciplinary Approach to Public Health
CARTA encourages fellows to address complex public and population health challenges through a multidisciplinary lens. Rather than restricting fellows to narrow disciplinary boundaries, the programme fosters research that draws on epidemiology, social science, economics, and policy analysis to understand health challenges in their full complexity.
This approach reflects the reality of public health in Africa, where health outcomes are shaped by interactions between biological, social, economic, and environmental factors. By training researchers who can work across disciplinary boundaries, CARTA aims to produce the kind of evidence that policymakers need to design effective interventions.
Evidence of Impact
By 2018, the programme was being actively evaluated to assess its effectiveness. Research published during that period, including studies covering the 2014–2018 timeframe, highlighted the programme's success in increasing research output and developing 'change agents' within home institutions.
The evaluation evidence pointed to several key outcomes:
- Increased publication rates among fellows compared to non-CARTA peers at similar career stages
- Improved supervision capacity at partner universities as fellows graduated and took on supervisory roles
- Enhanced institutional research infrastructure as fellows brought back skills and networks acquired through the programme
- Growing recognition of CARTA-trained researchers in international health research circles
Funding and Sustainability
CARTA's work is supported by a coalition of funders including the Wellcome Trust, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), and UK Aid, among others. The diversity of funding sources has been crucial to the programme's longevity, protecting it from the vulnerability that comes with dependence on a single funder.
The transition of CARTA's implementation to the Science for Africa (SFA) Foundation in subsequent years reflects a broader trend of African-led research funding management, moving away from the historical pattern where international funders managed African research programmes directly.
The Broader Context of Doctoral Training in Africa
CARTA operates within a landscape where doctoral training capacity in Africa remains severely constrained. The continent produces a fraction of the world's PhDs relative to its population, and many African universities lack the supervisory capacity, research infrastructure, and funding needed to support doctoral candidates at scale.
Programmes like CARTA, the African Leadership Centre's Peace, Security and Development Fellowship, and the EDCTP-AREF Preparatory Fellowships represent different approaches to this shared challenge. CARTA's distinctive contribution is its focus on institutional embedding — keeping fellows in their home universities while providing the training and networks they need.
The programme's emphasis on public and population health also aligns with the continent's most pressing research needs. Africa bears a disproportionate burden of infectious diseases, faces a growing non-communicable disease epidemic, and must navigate the health impacts of rapid urbanisation and environmental change. Producing researchers who can generate evidence to address these challenges is not merely an academic exercise — it is a public health imperative.
Looking Ahead
As Phase II progressed through 2018 and toward its 2020 conclusion, CARTA's leadership faced the question of how to sustain the model beyond the funded cycle. The institutionalisation strategy — embedding CARTA's approaches within partner universities' own doctoral programmes — represented the most promising pathway to long-term impact.
The programme's evolution also reflected broader shifts in African higher education, including the growing role of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) in coordinating research-intensive universities and the increasing emphasis on South-South collaboration in research training.
Sources
- CARTA, "About CARTA,"
- CARTA, "CARTA's Phases Over Time,"
- Tegakwitha et al., "CARTA doctoral training programme evaluation," National Institutes of Health, PMC8191976,
- University of Gothenburg, "Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA),"
- Science for Africa Foundation, "CARTA,"
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