Significant investment in early career scientists in Africa.

Ten scientists from Africa will receive a four-year fellowship to conduct cutting-edge research in global health in the United States.

The APTI program implemented by the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) in partnership with the US National Institute of Health NIH) has awarded fellowships worth US$226,800 to each of the recipients.

“Investing in early career scientists is vital for transforming Africa into a knowledge-based and technology led continent,” Peggy Oti-Boateng, Executive Director at the African Academy of Sciences said during the launch of the third cohort of the APTI programme.

Diana Mwendwa Marangu, paediatrician, pulmonologist, and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, says the skills gained during her fellowship will enable her to conduct world class research, focusing on the genetic basis of recurrent pneumonia in children and adolescents in Kenya.

Other fellows include Yaovi Mahutin Gildas Hounmanou (Benin), Kaelo K. Seatla (Botswana),Lobe Maloba Mabanyi Mesembe (Cameroon), Vinie Koumamou (Cameroon), Caroline Kumsevi-Kilola (DRC) Rita Afriyie Boateng (Ghana), Daniel Amoako-Sakyi (Ghana), Amadou Niangaly (Mali), and Alphonse Chinedu Ugwu (Nigeria). .

The fellows will begin their research activities in NIH labs in October and will focus on specific global health research priority areas, including human immunology, microbiology, microbiome research, drug discovery, genomics, HIV, malaria, maternal, neonatal and child health. They will spend the first two years at various laboratories in the US, and will be mentored by an NIH researcher in their field.

The second phase will be implemented in the fellows’ home institutions in Africa through research grants funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented by AAS.

“Each APTI fellow is supported with a research grant of up to US$226,800 for the African phase of the project to produce cutting-edge research while creating and supporting vibrant research ecosystems in their home institutions,” Boateng said.

She noted that the fellows were selected from a pool of 296 applicants based on excellence as well as potential for innovation, creativity, and research capacity strengthening.

Boateng explained that public health research was prioritised in alignment with Africa Union’s research priorities.

Musa Kana from Nigeria and the recipient of the inaugural APTI fellowship in 2019 says the programme opened a new world for him.

“The fellowship enabled me to be tutored and mentored by world-class scientists. It also provided me with requisite resources to undertake world-class scientific research and widened my network of scientific collaborators,” he said.

During the fellowship, Kana got the opportunity to develop and lead scientific projects and institutions. Currently, he is the principal investigator of the Kaduna Infant Development Cohort study, which is investigating the causal relationship between prenatal exposure and childhood stunting in Nigeria and is also the co-lead of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative-funded project to generate and characterise a comprehensive, validated cell atlas of healthy placenta cells of Nigerian women using single-cell analysis.

The fellowships announcement comes in the wake of a new push by African scholars and universities to transform research on the continent by advancing transformative international research collaborations.

Launched in Namibia, the “African Charter for Transformative Research Collaboration” which is led by Perivoli Africa Center (PARC) at the University of Bristol seeks to redress historical and entrenched power imbalances in global knowledge production.

Original article published by Nature Africa, linked here