The international cooperation with partners in East Africa and Germany has continued and taken some new directions:

 In December, the ‘East and South African-German Centre of Excellence for Educational Research Methodologies and Management – CERM-ESA’ graduated three doctoral students (Sarah Chemutai, Labani Kanyonga, Mercy Chemutai) and five Master’s students (Frank Mwaluko, Juma Mugaya, Jecinta Githiomi, Abdulkadir Shehu and Veronica Mkusa) at Moi University. Four of these students were co-supervised by our Faculty staff members (Dr. Ayanda Simayi, Prof Mathabo Khau, Prof em. Naydene de Lange and Prof em. Paul Webb). 

We also managed to finally publish our CERM-ESA open access book with contributions from our scholarship holders and their supervisors: Education research in African contexts.

 

In 2024, CERM-ESA received 18 Master’s scholarships in the DAAD In-Region / In-Country scholarship programme for the ‘Education Research’ Master at Moi University, which we jointly established some years ago together with our CERM-ESA partners (Moi University, University of Oldenburg, University of Dar es Salaam and Uganda Management Institute). The selected students come from Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria and took up their studies in September 2024. Furthermore, CERM-ESA – with its own DAAD funding – selected two new PhD scholarship holders: Annah Atuhaire and Jacob Munke Senteu. Both had completed their Master’s in the CERM-ESA programme already and excelled in the PhD scholarship selection process. 

 

Since CERM-ESA has entered into the ‘transition phase’, meaning that the project tis not fully funded any longer by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), i.e. only receives 20% of the original funding (2014-2023), the annual research schools for all scholarship holders, which took place biannually at Nelson Mandela University, could only be carried out digitally in 2024. In the future, we would like to focus on applying for additional funding to enable mobility between East and South Africa for our postgraduate students again – travelling and learning at a different institution in a different context is an invaluable learning experience that we don’t want them to miss. For now, six CERM-ESA Master’s and PhD scholarship holders of Moi University are visiting Oldenburg University for three months (February – April 2025) to analyse their data and write up their theses. 

 

The second project that is connected to CERM-ESA and also funded by the DAAD, is the ‘Digital Initiative for the Centres of African Excellence’ (DIGI-FACE). It was established to support all the 15 Centres of Excellence in Africa (which all have a German partner institution) to digitalise their activities and increase their impact. The platform is hosted by the Nelson Mandela University Digital Learning Experience Design & Innovation unit and co-managed by Kehl University and Oldenburg University in Germany. By now, DIGI-FACE under the leadership of Prof. em. Paul Webb has created nearly 20 cross-disciplinary online modules for competence development offered in English and French to (a) postgraduate students, (b) lecturers, supervisors and researchers, and (c) Centre staff members and managers.

 

All institutions working within the Centres of Excellence network are invited to participate in these modules, which aim to develop skills in online teaching and learning, supervision, academic publishing, proposal writing, quantitative methodologies and research coherence. Check out what DIGI-FACE offers!

 

https://www.digiface.org/learn/ 

 

In 2024, the DAAD also asked DIGI-FACE to provide specific competence development modules to all their scholarship holders in sub-Sahara Africa (approx. 200 postgraduate students per year). They study in various subject fields and universities across sub-Sahara Africa. In order to boost their competences and foster networking, DAAD asked us to design three six-week long modules: (1) Cutting-edge methods in science and research, (2) Science Communication and Networking, (3) Academic Career Planning. The first 12 cohorts completed the modules in November 2024 and the evaluation results show that the scholarship holders were very happy and benefited a lot from the modules’ content and networking. These modules will be offered twice in 2025 to new cohorts of emerging scholars from across sub-Saharan Africa.