AMARI collaborates with AfriqueOne on career development training

Dr Chris Merritt conducting one of the sessions

Dr Chris Merritt, AMARI

Building on our DELTAS training collaboration with the THRiVE consortium in Uganda last year, I visited Ivory Coast in late September to deliver four training workshops from our ACES career development series for the AfriqueOne Aspire programme. AfriqueOne is a DELTAS programme which focusses on zoonotic, foodborne and infectious diseases such as rabies, TB and brucellosis.

Nearly 60 research fellows (including master’s, PhD and post-doc) and several project staff attended the training, making it the largest group to take an ACES course to date. Most had travelled from other African countries in the AfriqueOne consortium to be there, including Senegal, Mali, Benin, Togo, Chad, Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana.

Over two full days, we covered research career strategy, mentoring skills, work-life balance and digital media through interactive sessions with plenty of discussion and exercises.

-          In career strategy, fellows learned how to make a specific plan for their future career path, taking control of their own careers and generating agency.

-          Mentoring skills gave fellows some mentoring theory as well as direct experience of mentoring conversations, with active listening and a problem-solving approach.

-          Work-life balance discussed tensions around managing time and activity between a demanding research career and other areas of life, such as family, health and relaxation. For this session, we were lucky to be joined by two really inspiring mid-career researchers – Dr Lydia Mosi (Ghana) and Dr Karim Ouattara (Ivory Coast) – to talk about their experiences of navigating the challenges of work-life balance while building successful careers.

-          Finally, our digital media workshop looked at briefing journalists on research, using blogs and social media to disseminate science to a general audience, as well as specific contemporary digital tools such as open data, open publication and video abstracts.

AfriqueOne fellows during the training

The training strengthened the existing collaboration between AMARI and AfriqueOne, which had begun last year with AMARI contributing some mental health expertise to an AfriqueOne fellow researching psychological aspects of infectious disease. It was great to add to this partnership between the projects.

We are looking forward to more collaboration in future, particularly thinking ahead to our plans for DELTAS II.