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Across Africa, the demand for knowledge has never been greater. From climate change to health systems, digital transformation to food security, the continent faces a web of complex, intersecting challenges. Yet paradoxically, while the urgency for African-led solutions intensifies, our universities struggle to produce the kind of advanced, homegrown expertise needed to drive sustainable development.  At the core of this dilemma is a systemic underproduction and underutilization of PhDs.  Africa contributes less than 2% of global research output, and many of its universities remain under-resourced, underfunded, and overly dependent on external collaborators. Doctoral education, supposed to be an engine of innovation, leadership, and knowledge production, suffers from fragile infrastructure, limited mentorship capacity, brain drain, and misaligned curricula.  It’s within this context that the Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) convened a number of timely and ambitious discussions over the past six months including a panel at the Paul Zeleza Conference at Howard University in May and a workshop during AAP’s annual consortium meeting held recently in Lilongwe, Malawi. The focus? A bold target set by the African Union: 100,000 PhDs in 10 years. This would require training scholars already in the system to PhD level and attracting new students into the system. But these conversations went far beyond the numbers, they were about the transformation of Africa’s doctoral education systems needed to achieve this goal.  Beyond Numbers: Rebuilding the Ecosystem  Speaking on a panel at a Howard University conference celebrating the 70th birthday of Prof. Paul Tiayambe Zeleza, Prof. Tawana Kupe called for wholesale systemic change in African graduate education, from application to graduation. Prof. Kupe is currently a higher education strategy advisor and former vice chancellor of the University of Pretoria. He emphasized the need to institute accountability mechanisms at every stage, to increase supervision capacity by having more PhD holders in universities’ faculty, to invest in infrastructure and space, and to changing from research only to coursework and sandwich doctorate structures.  At the AAP meeting in Lilongwe, Prof. Alex Kahi, AAP focal point at Egerton University, said, “To achieve this, we need a multifaceted approach. It’s not just about enrolling more students. We must reimagine the entire doctoral ecosystem, invest in funding, strengthen institutional capacity, reform curricula to solve real-world problems, and build administrative systems that support scholars from entry to postdoc.”  The discussion acknowledged that training a PhD is costly, averaging about $70,000 per year, or $350,000 across a five-year period. But more than just cost, it is also about value: What kind of researcher are we producing? Are they equipped to thrive in the job market, drive policy change, lead enterprises, or create new industries in Africa’s context?   “We need both quality and quantity,” emphasized Prof. Titus Awokuse. “But we also need relevance. At the moment, we’re not preparing enough PhDs to meet the needs of African societies and economies.”  Challenging the System: Gatekeepers, Mentors, and the Missing Middle  These discussions also shone a light on an uncomfortable but necessary issue: gatekeeping in academia. Many doctoral systems are dominated by senior academics or institutional norms that resist change, clinging to outdated methodologies, top-down supervision models, and narrow definitions of scholarly success.  At the Lilongwe meeting, Awokuse raised a crucial question: “How do we engage the gatekeepers who control access to doctoral spaces, resources, and networks?” Without disrupting this status quo, true reform may remain out of reach. For Dr. Linley Chiwona-Karltun, the solution lies partly in designing doctoral experiences around real-world relevance and global-local balance. “We need PhDs who have seen both worlds, those who spend time in the Global North and in Africa, gaining skills and perspectives that make their research meaningful on both fronts. To achieve that, we need meaningful and well-designed partnerships that will enable relevant mentorship and sharing of resources”  At the Zeleza conference panel, Prof. Kupe highlighted the crisis around PhD supervision. “Why do we recruit students even where we do not have the capacity to train or supervise, then make the students wander around looking for a supervisor?” He went on to contend that, “the one-supervisor model is terrible, especially when the supervisor is part of the majority sea of mediocrity that is so common in our public life, but can be good when the person is part of the minority oasis of hope, which is not very common.”   Decolonizing the PhD: Shifting Power, Reclaiming Voice  Several of the speakers at both events raised the need for collaboration among institutions and across global regions. At the Zeleza conference, AAP Makerere focal point Robert Wamala argued that, “universities could overcome some of their problems by investing in things like virtual laboratories, virtual research platforms and joint degree programmes.” AAP Co-Director, Amy Jamison suggested that joint supervision models involving north-south partnerships could alleviate the supervisor shortage crisis.   But it’s not just about collaboration, it’s also about reclaiming autonomy. “We need a paradigm shift,” said Dr. Dorothy Ngila, Deputy Chair of the AAP advisory board, at the Lilongwe meeting. “A shift that recognizes that African PhDs cannot simply replicate Euro-American models of knowledge. They must reflect African priorities, indigenous knowledges, and local contexts.” In this sense, decolonizing doctoral education is not just an ideological demand, it is a strategic necessity. It calls for a redesign of curricula, methodologies, and evaluation systems to empower scholars to ask the right questions and produce research that is impactful, contextually relevant, and globally respected.   At the Zeleza conference, Howard University’s Provost Prof. Anthony Wutoh applied this idea to AI as an emerging technology impacting graduate education globally. “Universities need to make use of artificial intelligence [AI] as a tool for supporting PhD training. Generative AI provides us with opportunities to rearrange the way we train doctorates, and we should leverage this.” He argued that since 90% of AI content is Eurocentric, Africans need to develop algorithms and content relevant to the African continent.  A Future of Questions, And Opportunity  Both events closed with a powerful sense of urgency, but also of possibility. And while consensus formed around several ideas, it was the questions that lingered most powerfully:  How do we retain African PhDs after we train them? Too many are lost to the Global North due to limited research funding, institutional instability, or lack of career opportunities. Can we create incentives, financial, academic, and emotional, that make African universities vibrant homes for doctoral talent and ecosystems that will enable them to thrive?  How do we embed curiosity, entrepreneurship, and leadership into doctoral pathways? PhDs should not just be technical experts, they must be problem-solvers, innovators, and systems thinkers. How do we build doctoral programmes that nurture imagination, risk-taking, and real-world impact?  How can small grants and local funding models empower the next generation of scholars? Large international funders often dominate the research agenda. Can we develop agile, African-led microgrant schemes to support emerging researchers with bold ideas and community-grounded questions?  What does it really mean to decolonize the PhD? Beyond slogans, what does it look like to change the very DNA of Africa’s doctoral systems, in who teaches, what is taught, how research is validated, and whose voices are centered?  Final Thoughts: The Doctoral Dream Must Be a Collective One  The vision of producing 100,000 PhDs in 10 years is not out of reach. But it will not happen by scaling up what already exists. It will require a deep and honest reckoning with the structures, cultures, and ideologies that shape how we train scholars in Africa. If anything, the workshop in Lilongwe was a clarion call, not just to increase PhD numbers, but to transform what a PhD means for Africa’s future.  The path ahead demands courage, collaboration, and creativity. But most of all, it demands that we ask, and keep asking, the right questions.  Read more