Project description
Bridging global research gaps for sustainable development
Across the African continent, a critical scarcity of R&D professionals poses a hurdle to addressing pressing global issues. Compared to other regions, Africa lacks a robust cadre of R&D staff, hindering progress on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the GROW project emerges as a transformative solution. GROW, or Graduate Research On Worldwide challenges, is an innovative international PhD programme designed to cultivate tomorrow’s leaders by providing them with the tools to conduct high-quality research on issues affecting Africa and the world. Spanning the disciplines of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and engineering, the project aims to equip PhD students with a future-proof skill set, ensuring they contribute significantly to meeting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Objective
GROW – Graduate Research On Worldwide challenges – is an international PhD programme that offers tomorrow’s leaders a unique opportunity to do high quality and novel research with supervision from globally renowned professors on pressing issues affecting the people of Africa, and make a real contribution to understanding and addressing worldwide problems. Research and innovation that is interdisciplinary, international and intersectoral (Triple-I) stands a better chance of understanding wicked challenges and producing creative and effective solutions. Thus, they can play a vital role in meeting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Currently the African continent has few R&D staff compared to other regions. With GROW we invest in training scholars with an understanding of the continent, while strengthening existing Africa – Netherlands partnerships. Because academic and non-academic stakeholders are involved from the start – collective learning and co-creation makes for deeper understanding of the challenges and their trade-offs, more detailed specs, earlier prototype testing, more opportunities for validation and transforming academic research results into real-world developments. As the science is complex and original, it can also be captured in high quality scientific papers. For GROW, 6 high ranking Dutch universities have joined up with 22 African academic and 16 non-academic partners so that 51 PhD students from anywhere in the world can pursue scientifically challenging research that in some way links LMICs in Africa with Europe. The possibilities are manifold, as fellowships are available in the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences & Humanities, and Engineering. The Triple-I design of the GROW programme offers the PhD students the chance to equip themselves with an advanced, future-proof set of scientific and complementary skills that they will take with them as they pursue high-flying careers in a world that is becoming ever more complex and interconnected.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Coordinator
2628 CN Delft
Netherlands