A psychologist from Keele University has received funding from the British Academy for a project to work with 20 early career researchers across Africa. 

Dr Masi Noor, Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Psychology, will be leading the collaborative effort with international colleagues, which aims to boost academic research in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Uganda by dismantling barriers to African researchers’ publication efforts and offering essential skills training to early career researchers. 

Despite significant improvements in education levels in Africa, the continent is still excluded from the inner edge of global academic research efforts, contributing only 1% to the world’s research output.  

Dr Noor’s project aims to devise a new model of collaboration with African early career scholars, including individual-level mentoring for 20 early career scholars from Ethiopia, South Africa, and Uganda to enhance their publication records, grant successes, and career prospects.  

Together with his team, Dr Noor will also create and facilitate direct dialogue between African researchers and chief editors of major academic journals in Social Psychology and broader Social Sciences to address systemic barriers to African scholarship in the publishing ecosystem.  

The project, which has been funded by a £30,000 British Academy grant, also aligns with each of the three countries’ Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the goals of the African Union. 

Dr Masi Noor said: “I am very grateful to the British Academy for recognising the potential of our initiative and enabling us to undertake this impactful work. Having recently completed a three-year tenure as a journal chief editor, I have firsthand experience of the numerous barriers entrenched within international journals that hinder African scholarship.  

“We aspire for this project to serve as a catalyst for urgent transformation within the publishing ecosystem, because for far too long the scientific contributions and wisdom of African scholars have been excluded and overlooked. Indeed, such exclusion comes at a high cost, namely: depriving ourselves of the intellectual resources and innovative solutions that African scholars could offer to some of humanity's most pressing challenges.”