Workshop‐Based Training for Capacity Building: Using Drosophila to Bring Research Skills to Africa
Authors: Vicente‐Crespo Marta , Muñoz‐Descalzo Silvia , Weil Tim , Martín‐Bermudo Maria Dolores , Palacios Isabel 
Published: November 2023

The general contraction that African research suffered in the 90's left its tertiary institutions with a generational gap difficult to fill. The few students that enrol for postgraduate training face serious limitations specially in the areas of mentoring through the academic career and supervision of their research. At the university they find a generally aged academic population and proportions of PhD holders below 50% in many cases. Consequently, the average African postgraduate student receives below‐the‐average‐training resulting in the perpetuation of low‐skilled academic staff being in charge of the training of those who are meant to be the leaders of the rise of Africa.

DrosAfrica aims at training faculty and postgraduate students on how to use Drosophila as a research model to enable them to do affordable and impacting research. We bring international Drosophila experts to teach in workshops that are designed to address the research interests of the local partners and we work to establish fly communities that can lead their own projects. We aim at African researchers who have recently established their labs or are likely to be in the position to do so in the future so that the impact can expand to their trainees. In a two‐week intensive workshop our training program includes Developmental Biology, Genetics, Molecular Biology and modelling of human diseases. Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) tools have been used to evaluate the participants gains. The trainees are incorporated to a learning community that facilitates sharing of information and follow ups of the activities of the alumni are done periodically via e‐mail.

The SALG surveys showed good to great gains across all aspects of the workshop. Our follow up shows that a small fly community has been created at KIU and biomedical researchers are asking mechanistic questions that were out of their reach before. Not surprisingly, the faculty also evaluated their experience very positively.

The central theme of this presentation will be the case study of an alumni of the first workshop who has already established a research group working with Drosophila. Three Pharmacy undergraduate students supervised by him have already graduated after doing their final project with flies. One undergraduate, one MSc and two PhD students (Pharmacy, Pharmacology and Biochemistry, respectively) are currently learning‐by‐doing in an environment were this was just a dream not long ago. Other cases will also be discussed. The poster submitted by H. W. Kinyi to this conference is another example of the success attained in KIU. DrosAfrica is now working with ICIPE (Kenya) and University of Ibadan (Nigeria) to adapt the training to their context and attempt to replicate the success.

In conclusion, efforts focused in building up a few people have led to great gains. In three years we have seen our alumni, their trainees and their colleagues develop their own research ideas using Drosophila. Moreover, participating in our activities gives everyone the opportunity to gain knowledge and skills, and establish research collaborations and mentoring relationships across borders. DrosAfrica is an example of how engaged scholarship can make a difference.

Support or Funding Information

DrosAfrica workshops have been funded by TWAS, EMBO, Cambridge‐Africa Alborada Research Fund, Sayansi R4D, Fruit4Science, Wellcome Trust, Emmanuel College, Pembroke College and Prof. Tony Kouzarides. We also acknowledge the support of Trend and Rukararwe.