Harnessing a University's Strengths to Build Research for the Region

In East Africa, the three countries where the Strengthening Capacity for Agricultural Research and Development in Africa (SCARDA) gave support—Burundi, Rwanda, and Sudan—are all grappling with their own conflict-related challenges. While Burundi and Rwanda have been striving to reconstruct themselves after disastrous periods of genocide and civil war, Sudan, a country torn by long-standing and interlocking conflicts, split into two countries in 2011, when the southern region voted to secede from Khartoum.

For all three (now four) countries, hindered by severe shortages of highly trained scientists, amongst other things, SCARDA has offered a lifeline, particularly through the opportunities it provided for Masters level training for young scientists. SCARDA was able to capitalize on the pre-existing strengths of the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a network for advanced training and research to support smallscale farmers and economic development in agriculture, which encompasses 29 universities across the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region, offering specialized Masters and PhD-level training programmes.

As the lead service provider for SCARDA in the East African region, RUFORUM leveraged its pre-existing relationships with universities in the region, and in some cases provided training for SCARDA-sponsored students through its pre-existing MSc programmes. Because of the strength of its relationships with universities, the organization was in a good position to broker agreements and arrangements with universities to train students coming in from different countries and educational backgrounds, says Wellington Ekaya, the programme manager for RUFORUM who coordinated the SCARDA programmes. The purpose of RUFORUM is to train African researchers at the highest level, in an African environment, to equip them to make important contributions in areas of national priority—an objective which dovetailed with SCARDA’s aim of capacity strengthening.

The Network’s approach of harnessing the strengths and pockets of expertise that exist within particular universities, in order to build training and research capacity across the broader region, has gained credence in recent years as an effective way to deliver topcalibre advanced training in Africa, where experts and resources are typically thinly spread. Since 1994, RUFORUM has illustrated the effectiveness of this approach in agriculture, by contributing towards building up a cadre of high-level researchers and academics in fields such as plant breeding and drylands resource management. While each particular programme, such as plant