Equitable research partnerships across Africa and Europe - challenges and opportunities

Creating equitable research collaborations between the Global North and Global South has been a struggle for many years. How do you create equitability when there is a structural imbalance in the core element of research: funding? And how do you balance the need for global collaboration with differences in values on diversity issues like gender, race, LGTBQ+ issues, etc.?

These are not easy questions, but the Guild of Research Intensive Universities (The Guild) and African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) are trying to navigate these challenges through the Africa-Europe Clusters of Research Excellence (CoRE). We chatted with Sean Rowlands, senior policy advisor at The Guild, about the initiative, the role of the AU-EU Innovation Agenda moving forward, and how they intend to work with diversity. 

It was a great chat about bottom-up initiatives and top-down policies, insisting on equity, funding, building trust and learning from each other. 

We hope you’ll all follow the CoRE project and see how they work with equity, which the rest of us can learn from.

The episode is edited and produced by Peter Xiong.

It is sponsored by Digital Science.

To learn more:

Learn more about the Africa-Europe Clusters of Research Excellence initiative, led by The Guild and ARUA here: https://www.the-guild.eu/africa-europe-core/ 

African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA): https://arua.org/about/ 

The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities: https://www.the-guild.eu/about/

You can connect with Sean Rowlands on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-rowlands/ 

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If you're interested in our work with diversity and internationalisation in research, please visit www.diversiunity.com.