The ACU's work supporting early career researchers specialising in climate change in sub-Saharan Africa has been boosted, with a one-year extension for the CIRCLE – or Climate Impacts Research Capacity and Leadership Enhancement – programme. This funding will enhance professional development support for emerging researchers in universities across Africa.
Success to date
Since 2014 the ACU and African Academy of Sciences (AAS) have been working in partnership to develop the skills of early career African researchers, increase their research output and boost the impact of their research within their communities and beyond.
To date, 97 early career researchers from 10 countries across sub-Saharan Africa have benefited from supervised research fellowships to study the impacts of climate change. These Fellows carried out crucial multi-disciplinary research on strategic approaches to coping with the effects of climate change in fields such as water, energy, agriculture, political economy and health and livelihoods.
Beyond support for individuals, the institutional strengthening programme (ISP) element of the CIRCLE programme has successfully supported participating universities to develop a coordinated and strategic approach to supporting their early career researchers. Through the ISP, successful universities were awarded funding to run strategic events and training programmes, focusing on embedding good practice in their institutions.
More information
An independent review of CIRCLE (undertaken in 2017) praised the programme, but noted that more time and extra funding would enable the ISP to become embedded within participating institutions, allowing CIRCLE to demonstrate measurable and sustainable change.
Over the next 12 months, the CIRCLE programme will focus on building upon the successes to date within the institutional strengthening programme (ISP) and implementing a comprehensive monitoring framework to measure the impact of related activities within each institution. This will in turn support all our returning CIRCLE Visiting Fellows (CVFs), as well as their peers, by ensuring that their institutions offer an increasingly supportive environment in which to build successful and high-impact research careers.
Visit www.acu.ac.uk/CIRCLE for further information about the programme.
Please contact verity.buckley@acu.ac.uk for further information on the programme extension. For any further queries, please contact press@acu.ac.uk
This post was originally published on the ACU website. Click here to view the original article.
