Equity, Research Security and Research Impact: ARMA and SFA’s Continued Commitment to African Research Management

On 18th March, the Science for Africa Foundation launches a new training programme designed to strengthen research management capability for colleagues across African institutions.  

In October 2020, ARMA partnered with the Science for Africa Foundation (formerly under the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA))  to launch the International Research Management Staff Development Programme (IRMSDP). It was an opportunity for ARMA to strengthen its ties with international sister associations and create meaningful global networking opportunities for its members. The timing was, to put it mildly, ambitious. The world was in the grip of a pandemic. Plans that had been carefully constructed were quietly dismantled and reconstructed, often overnight. 

Despite those challenges, the IRMSDP held firm to what made it distinctive: positioning African research managers not as recipients of expertise, but as co-creators of it. Fifty-seven professionals across six international teams, drawn from the UK and ten African countries including South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, worked together to produce 47 open-access toolkits and frameworks for the wider research management community (can be accessed here). 

But the programme also revealed something important: capacity development in research management is not a single event. It requires iteration, context, and the kind of sustained engagement that goes beyond one cohort of workshops.  

Built around what matters 

This programme is a direct response to those insights. Running from March to July 2026, it brings together up to 30 research management professionals from African institutions for a structured sequence of workshops, coaching clinics and peer-led dissemination. The focus is deliberately applied: equitable research partnerships, research security, and research impact. 

These are not abstract themes. They are the pressure points that African research managers navigate daily – structural power imbalances that shape who benefits from partnerships, emergent risks in a competitive global knowledge economy, and the challenge of evidencing impact where resources and evaluation infrastructure are stretched. 

Real capacity strengthening takes root when it is built from within, when the people closest to the work are equipped, supported, and connected to a framework that outlasts any single programme. That is what makes this different. The programme is anchored to the Good Research Management Practice (GRMP) Standard – a continent-wide framework developed by the SFA Foundation to support governance, ethics and professionalisation within African research institutions. Its inclusion signals that this training is not designed in isolation; it is part of a broader, evolving institutional architecture for research management in Africa. 

By combining structured skills development, peer learning and coaching, and anchoring it all to the GRMP Standard, this programme gives participants somewhere institutional to land. Building research ecosystems that are genuinely equitable, secure and productive is not a short-term project. But it starts here. 

Watch for updates in the ARMA newsletter and mark your calendars for July. 

By Eva Kagiri-Kalanzi, International Cooperation and Development Expert, Synapse-Collaborative