The Carnegie Corporation of New York funded programmes participating in PERKA are:
The African Academy of Sciences’ AESA Regional Initiative in Science Education Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme (AESA-RISE) builds on the Regional Initiative in Science Education (RISE) programme and provides postdoctoral fellowships to researchers in African institutions to research critical issues to sustainable development in Africa.
Aim: The aim of the programme is to build the capacity of African researchers to conduct globally competitive research and contribute to the transition of the continent’s economies to knowledge-based economies.
Length of fellowship: Fixed-term of three years.
Target group: PhD graduates who are alumni of the Science Initiative Group (SIG) RISE programme are eligible to apply if they have graduated with their PhD’s no more than seven years prior.
The African Humanities Programme (AHP), funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in partnership with the New-York based American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), offers pre- and postdoctoral fellowships to researchers in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Aim: The aim of the postdoctoral fellowships is to invigorate postdoctoral research in the humanities through providing staff at African universities a year free from teaching to build their capacities as early career researchers by allowing time for revision of their dissertations for publication, or for the first major research project after the PhD.
Length of fellowship: One academic year.
Target group: To be eligible postdoctoral candidates must have obtained their PhD’s no longer than eight years ago.
The Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) is jointly led by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Kenya and the School of Public Health, University of Witwatersrand (Wits), in South Africa. Nine academic and four research institutions from West, East, Central, and Southern Africa, as well as select northern universities and training institutes collaborate in to strengthen the research infrastructure and the capacity to conduct research at African universities and to provide a collaborative training to advance population and public health research. The aim of CARTA is to build the capacity of African institutions and researchers to conduct multidisciplinary research that will have a positive impact on population and public health on the continent.
Aim: To further the careers of the CARTA doctoral programme graduates through offering postdoctoral fellowships (unstructured) and re-entry grants (more structured programme including a mandatory visit to a mentor in another institution and a visit by the mentor to the fellows’ home institution).
Length of fellowship: One year.
Target group: CARTA PhD graduates.
Over several years the Carnegie Corporation of New York has been investing in the human resource capacity development at Makerere University through providing funding for the training of Masters’ and PhD students. Recently, the focus has shifted to providing on-going support for these graduates through the provision of research funds to develop capacity at the postdoctoral level. The first postdoctoral research support programme was initiated in 2010 under the title “Building, Nurturing, and Retaining the Next Generation of African Academics (NGAA)”. The current fellowship programme is titled “Nurturing Emerging Research Leaders Through Postdoctoral Training (NERLP)”.
Aim: Develop institutional capacity at Makerere University at the postdoctoral level and promote staff retention.
Length of fellowship: The postdoctoral fellowships run over two years.
Target group: Fellows must be former Carnegie Corporation supported PhD graduates who are employed full-time at Makerere University and who completed their PhDs no more than 10 years ago.
RUFORUM is a consortium consisting of 126 African universities operating within 38 countries in Eastern, Central, Western, and Southern Africa. In 2018 RUFORUM launched the Wajao postdoctoral fellowship programme with funding received from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to build on and scale up the commitment by RUFORUM to increase African academics’ training and mobility.
Aim: The aim of the fellowship is to increase the retention of researchers at African academic institutions as a means to strengthen the institutions’ research and teaching capacity to meet the growing need for higher education and for research to enhance knowledge creation and prosperity on the continent.
Length of fellowship: Two years
Target group: Doctoral graduates who graduated from RUFORUM regional doctoral training programmes funded by Carnegie are eligible to apply.
In 2017 University of Cape Town launched its Developing Emerging Academic Leaders (UCT-DEAL) fellowship programme, offering research fellowships to both postdoctoral and early career (post-postdoctoral) researchers. The programme builds on the earlier Next Generation of Academics in Africa (NGAA) programme.
Aim: The aim of is to strengthen higher education in Africa through providing support to academics in the transition phase to an independent academic career. DEAL offers postdoctoral fellowship and early career researcher grants.
Length: Both the early career researcher and postdoctoral fellowships run over the course of three years.
Target group: Candidates who have previously been awarded funding through the Next Generation of Academics in Africa (NGAA) programme and are a national of an African country are eligible to apply. Furthermore, postdoctoral fellowship applicants must have obtained their doctoral degree no more than five years ago and/or have completed no more than two years of postdoctoral training. Applicants who hold a full-time employment contract at UCT are eligible for the early career researcher fellowships.
Through funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) the University of Ghana has successfully trained numerous MPhil and PhD candidates over the past five years through its Next Generation of African Academics (NGAA) project. Building on the successes of NGAA, the CCNY provided further funding to the University of Ghana, to focus on further developing the academic careers of NGAA doctoral graduates through the Building a New Generation of Academics in Africa (BANGA-Africa) project.
Aim: To further develop the skills that the graduates acquired during their PhD training, and in so doing ensure that they become established researchers retained at the University of Ghana.
Length of fellowship: One year
Target group: Candidates appointed full-time as academic staff at the University of Ghana within the last five years and who have also earned their PhD no more than five years ago, are eligible to apply.
The Early Career Research Leader Fellowship (ECRLF) was initiated by the University of Pretoria’s Future Africa Institute in 2019.
Aim: The aim of the ECRLF is to build the capacity of early career researchers in Africa with the intent to stimulate the development of research centres of excellence that will, in time, contribute to solving complex problems facing Africa and the world.
Length of fellowship: Two years.
Target group: Fellows who hold a PhD degree or equivalent qualification, are appointed at a research institution in Africa where they are active in research and teaching, have a sustained record of outstanding scientific or scholarly outputs, and who have linkages to programs supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, are eligible to apply for the fellowships.
The programme for clinician-scientists is a clinical/academic medicine called “Nurturing the Next Generation of African Scientists (NNGAS)”, that was developed in light of growing concerns about the decline of research-based medicine in South Africa. This decline is mainly attributed to the shortage of medical personnel in South Africa, and the resultant workload carried by these clinicians which leaves little time to conduct research.
Aim: The fellowship aims to address the growing concerns about the decline of research-based medicine in South Africa.
Length of fellowship: Two years.
Target group: Candidates who have obtained a PhD as a fellow of the Carnegie Clinician Scientist PhD Programme are eligible to apply for the NNGAS fellowships.
The Global Change Institute (GCI) at Wits was established to enable transdisciplinary research with a local and global impact that can inform action for adaptation and innovation in the rapidly changing Southern African region and with a focus on global change, climate change and sustainability research. GCI hosts the “Developing the Next Generation of African Scholars” programme. The Institute has received three separate rounds of funding from the Corporation, with the first two rounds focusing on PhD and postdoctoral fellow support, and the third and current round focusing on supporting researchers making the transition from the postdoctoral phase to the early career scientist phase.
Aim: To ensure that a cadre of future leaders is trained who will have the capacity to predict future scenarios and offer solutions.
Length of fellowship: One year, with the possibility of renewal for an additional year dependent on performance assessment.
Eligibility: PhD alumni supported through previous grants are eligible to apply.
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