Mentorship has been pursued under AfricaLics to enhance capacity building in the I&D field. To this end, a mentorship report was written based on a survey that was conducted in 2020. One of the emerging recommendations was the development of an AfricaLics strategy on mentoring to provide direction on mentoring activities and a dedicated mentorship programme for AfricaLics.
What is AfricaLics’ understanding of mentorship?
In AfricaLics, mentorship (or mentoring) is defined as an interactive process between someone with considerable experience in Innovation and Development studies research on the one hand and someone (e.g. a post-graduate or early career scholar) who wants to learn from this experience. In the best cases, the interaction leads to mutual learning, so both partners in the relationship benefit from the interaction. Mentoring can relate to specific skills (e.g. writing a good conference paper or a good journal paper), but can also be broader and related to knowledge in the professional field or how to build your career. It follows from this that, mentoring can take many forms. In the case of AfricaLics, mentoring is part of the PhD academies, the PhD visiting fellowship programme (VFP) and the Globelics/AfricaLics conferences