SN 2 EP 10: Engendering Africa’s Research Ecosystem: Dr. Dorothy Ngila’s Vision for Inclusive Science.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
research, continent, funding agencies, granting councils, science, gender, women, inclusivity, NRF support, system, strengthening, change, South Africa, engendering, policies.

Listen

EPISODE SUMMARY:

This episode features a powerful narrative of resilience, innovation, and the ongoing quest for inclusive science in Africa. Dr. Dorothy Ngila, drawing from her unique “Afropolitan” experience, presents a roadmap for institutional reform in science and research. She unpacks the critical role of funding agencies in driving inclusivity, the power of pan-African collaborations like the Science Granting Councils Initiative, and the necessity of reimagining policies and practices to create truly equitable research environments. Dr. Ngila offers a fresh perspective on how to unlock Africa’s full scientific potential by addressing structural barriers and fostering a more inclusive, collaborative approach to research and innovation.

HERE ARE THE KEY THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR:

Afropolitan Journey: Dr. Ngila’s unique “Afropolitan” background and how it shaped her career path, from struggling with mathematics to becoming a leader in research policy and capacity building.

SGCI Impact: The transformative role of the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) in strengthening research capacities across 17 African countries, including improved grant management processes and increased collaboration.

Gender in Science: Dr. Ngila’s passionate advocacy for women in science, emphasizing the need to shift focus from individual empowerment to institutional change for creating truly inclusive scientific environments.

Global Collaboration: The influence of Dr. Ngila’s involvement with the Global Research Council on shaping gender equality initiatives in research funding, and her optimistic vision for future changes in addressing gender disparities in academia.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Intro:

Welcome to Mazungumzo, African scholarly conversations, a podcast that highlights the perspectives of various stakeholders in academia, and research fields across Africa through open dialogue or mazungumzo on scholarly communication in Africa.

Joy Owango:

Welcome to Mazungumzo – African Scholarly Conversations, where we are joined by an expansive list of African policymakers, science communication specialists, innovators, and tertiary institution leads who contribute to this realm of science communication and Scholarly Communication.  I’m your host Joy Owango, the Executive Director of the Training Center in communication, a capacity building trust based at the University of Nairobi Chiromo campus in Kenya.

Today we have the pleasure of having as our guest, Dr. Dorothy Ngila. Dr. Ngila is the Director of Strategic Partnerships in the Business Advancement Unit at the NRF South Africa. She plays a key role in coordinating the organization’s involvement in the Science Granting Councils Initiative in sub-Saharan Africa and supports the engagement of the NRF in knowledge networks. But her impact extends beyond her role at NRF South Africa, she serves on the Executive Committee of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) South African National Chapter, has previously served on the Gender Working Group of the Global Research Council, and currently serves on the GRC Executive Support Group.

A warm welcome to the programme Dr. Ngila!

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Thank you very much for having me, Joy. It’s so wonderful to be connected with you again.

Joy Owango:

Oh yes, it is. Could you share a bit more about yourself and your journey in academia, research and most obviously policy, particularly considering your unique position as a Kenyan at NRF South Africa? How has your Afropolitan background shaped your path in academia and influenced your current role?

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

This is such a loaded question, Joy in many ways. One has to unpack what it means to be Afropolitan, and what it means to be a woman in academia and research in the continent, right? So yes, I am very proudly Kenyan, very proudly East African, very proudly recently, to be connected with Lesotho and having grown up in Botswana and having lived for almost 20 years now in South Africa, so pretty much a child of the continent, and it is one of the greatest assets that I think, I bring into this work around how we think about strengthening research systems, strengthening academia on the continent. Being located in South Africa has been such a joy and such a unique way for me to contribute to something that I feel very passionate about. So, I was born in Kenya. I have lived in Kenya, went to my foundational schooling in Kenya, finished all the way to secondary school, and went to the University of Botswana to do my first degree in Botswana, and there something really shifted for me at University of Botswana. What shifted was just a recognition of how the Kenyan education system at that time had really supported and grown me to become a confident person who believes in their smartness and being able to be the excellence on board. But I also happen to have a mentor who is also my second mother, who I lived with, and she is a Professor of Chemistry, and she was just such a breath of fresh air in my life being able to, every day, see how she lives her excellence, not just talk about it. I left the University of Botswana, and I always tell people fun fact about me is that when I finished KCSE in Kenya, I got a D in Mathematics.

So, I got into University in Botswana, and first semester they say I have to do a course in statistics. I told myself, there is no way I would ever graduate from university. You people don’t understand, I didn’t do well in mathematics, right? So then, and this is the power of thinking about science and the ecosystem approach. I want to tell you a story around. My mom, that I’m telling you about, Professor Catherine Ngila sat with me every single night for a whole year to teach me statistics, and consistently said to me, my child, this is not hard, practice, practice, practice, and understand the concept, and then how you utilize the concept.

Joy Owango:

It’s about method.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Right?

Joy Owango:

Yes. It’s about method.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

That’s a born teacher. I found myself under this mentorship. Joy remember, D in KCSE. First semester at University of Botswana, Statistics, 101, I must go back and see my transcript again, but first semester, I think I got 98% Statistics 101. Second semester. Statistics 102, I got 100%

Joy Owango:

There you go.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

And that completely shifted my understanding. It completely shifted my whole trajectory, right? Because there I was looking at my KCSE results and looking at what a year of being mentored, of somebody really believing in your abilities can do to you. I remember thinking this completely shifted my life, and of course, I left the University of Botswana and collected all the accolades, best performer, best whatever, and I had a really good aggregate, at the end of university, which allowed me to go directly to do my masters at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Now I’m reflecting and Joy as we speak, I think this is where I got really hooked on capacity strengthening and

from an ecosystem approach because I could see how being supported allowed me to become the person that I have become. And this world of how do we support science? How do we support the science ecosystem on the continent, right? And eventually, of course, it lands me after working with the Academy of Science of South Africa for seven years to the National Research Foundation (NRF South Africa), which has been the most incredible time of my life.

Joy Owango:

You know you’re right because you went through a mentorship process when you realized that you had kind of lost hope on certain subjects, and I went through that as well in high school. It happened to be just like you, I performed abysmally in math, and then when I went into high school, my math teacher was my physics teacher, and she failed to understand how I would fail in math, but pass the math that was in physics.

So just like Professor Catherine Ngila, the way she took you through the process, she taught me, it’s about method, and I can assure you, because of that, it also struck the bag on capacity building and support for me, but most importantly, understanding, appreciating science, physics has become one of my favorite subjects. I love math right now. So, it’s about mentorship, and I can see where your passion has come from. Because if they had given up on you, you’d still think that, yes, it’s that D, that was there, but now here you got D, then statistics, 98 then 100 because somebody took, made the effort to mentor you. And it’s that level of capacity strengthening that is really important in the research life cycle. And I believe working with the NRF South Africa, this has even thrusted you into having greater activities in capacity strengthening.

Could you now tell us your key role in coordinating NRF’s involvement in the science granting councils initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa, and could you share more about the impact of SGCI on investment in higher education and research across the continent, and what specific changes or advancements have been witnessed through this initiative?

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

So I arrived at the NRF on the first of November 2015 to launch this journey of the SGCI, and at the time, all of us, our colleagues at IDRC, our colleagues at FCDO, we knew that there was something that needed to be done, which is there’s a gap here around capacities of public funding agencies, the NRF had experienced it a number of years where bilateral relationships with our sister agencies, but consistently being asked as part of those bilateral relationships to really share on some of the practices of research and grants management to strengthen. So we knew that there was a need that was there on the continent, and we knew that we’d certainly had a gap that needed to be filled. But I think what we didn’t anticipate was, number one, the political will that would come to support this work from the granting councils themselves, but also the incredible lessons that we would learn about the business of capacity strengthening, right?

Joy Owango:

Yes, yes, especially this high level.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

And I want to share a little bit with you about that. At the core, the SGCI is a capacity strengthening initiative that focuses on the business of public funding agencies, and we selected various thematic areas that we wanted to focus on. At the core of what public funding agencies are is that we are managers of public money for research, and so your research and grants management capacities are probably the core. It is the core of the business that you do. That’s number one. Number two is in our current environment, where we’re talking about gender and inclusivity and the integration of gender and inclusivity in the way that we make decisions about who to fund and where to fund, exactly, and how it’s integrated in our funding agencies as part of our policies and statements and our processes. It becomes a really critical theme of the SGCI. Again, it’s not just about public money. It is also about engaging quite actively, not only with each other, to be able to fund bilateral and multilateral partnerships, but to also be able to fund together with private sector partners, and this is so critical in a number of ways, to enable our graduates get jobs and get internships and other placements that enable them to get industry experience, but also translating it back to, how do we partner with the private sector… specialization and all kinds of other practices. And the last part is around evidence and how our funding decisions, the funded work that we engage in, finds itself in effect when governments have to make decisions about where to fund, how much to fund, and what is going to be part of that kitty. So, the SGCI has been working with 17 granting councils in East Africa, West Africa, Southern Africa, to really support all of us and partner together with all of us to be able to strengthen these capacities. For me there are three key areas that the SCGI has changed or contributed to a change in the funding landscape of the continent. The first one is that we have a much greater understanding of the existing capacities and the contributions of public funding agencies than we did…. So we are consistently engaged in understanding, what do we mean by research excellence as funding agencies on the continent? What do we mean when we say that we want to enter into private sector partnerships? What do we mean when we say that we need to start thinking about resourcing in a different kind of way, or, how do we support students better as a collective? So, it’s a scholarly contribution about the business of granting.

The second part is about connecting us as science granting councils. You think it’s a low hanging fruit, right? But there is a method to it. So, we’ve been working together to make sure that we have longer term MOUs. We’ve been working together in areas where there are trans boundary issues, how do you come together in a bilateral, multilateral way to connect with each other. And how does the SGCI catalyze that? You know you see now that there are research projects that are being funded by numerous public funding agencies.

Joy Owango:

Yes, we’re seeing a lot of that. Yeah.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

And I think the last one is to circle back to improving how we are doing our business, when we started with the SCGI, there were certain granting councils that did not have their research and grants management processes.

Joy Owango:

Yes, I remember.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Right now, there are a number of them that have got systems in place, digital systems that a researcher can go and apply for grants and the whole process is liaised in that way. We have really learned about the business of granting in a way that enables us as officials that are in the granting councils, not only to have each other as peers, but also be able to improve it in our own councils. Those I would say, would be such critical components, just circling back to the question of institutional capacity strengthening and how the SGCI has catalyzed that in the continent.

Joy Owango:

But then If you look at it from a global community perspective, now the rest of the world is seeing a change. They’re seeing a paradigm shift in Africa every time I’m giving talks, I’m always proud of the SGCI, because we can finally say we have African governments funding higher education and research. And even though some of them are young, they are putting systems in place so that they can also improve on resource mobilization. We didn’t have this 18 years ago, and you have to start from somewhere. So this is such a success story for the continent that other parts of the global south can also emulate from, you know? So the SGCI, I can assure, is one of the proudest initiatives that has that has come out of the continent, it is a proper representation of the African Union and its commitment to supporting STI in Africa and also debunking the Truth that African governments cannot fund research. No matter how little it is we can fund research. The truth is, the amount might not be large, but we are doing something. We are making an effort to improve the ecosystem. And the SGCI is a classic example of that.

Joy Owango:

you wear many hearts. Oh yes, yes. Before I go to the next question, go ahead, yes. Dorothy,

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

You know, I wanted to say, something else that is really exciting about the SGCI and how we’ve built it is that we don’t just stop at the capacity strengthening that is provided by the granting councils. We also work together with the councils to put money into funding actual research projects. We work together with the councils to think about, how can we fund together in a multilateral way? The last point of this is that we also work together to support other councils, other public funding agencies, that want to come and partner with us. Prominent examples of that keeping to our really fantastic partnership with IDRC together, we’ve been funding The OR Tambo Research Chairs in sub-Saharan Africa, a longer-term experiment. We are now in our sixth year, with 10 chairs on the continent. I mean, there’s an entire podcast just to talk about how the OR Tambo Research Chairs came into being

Joy Owango:

That’s a good idea.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

I am so proud that we have got researchers in Burkina Faso that are doing cancer research that are being funded on a longer-term basis. I’m so proud that we are funding, more work around vaccinations.

Joy Owango:

And this is ours. It’s coming from our home

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

It’s ours. Yes, and it’s in such a way that we can start to build in sustainability.  Thinking about it on a longer-term basis the universities have to be thinking about the sustainability of these chairs beyond the term that we are going to be there.

Joy Owango:

Fantastic

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

In the wake of Covid 19, we funded Covid 19 Africa Rapid Grant Fund, which funded 73 projects in science communication, science advice and research in those countries of the SGCI, and it was such a fantastic first time to pilot this kind of responding to a crisis that makes it much easier if you’re doing it as a group, rather than doing it in a national way. Yeah, and you know, so proud of the work that we are doing with our colleagues in Japan to fund environmental sciences, also in the context of this program, and recently with the German Research Foundation, as well as our colleagues in the Dutch Research Council. So, I’m seeing that the SGCI is providing an opportunity for visibility and profiling of these councils in a way that we would not have done on their own.

Joy Owango:

Yes. It’s a typical example of the saying, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go together.

But if you’re unified, you end up stronger together by the end of the day. And that is actually the power of this continent, the SGCI, is heavily entrenched on Pan-Africanism and it’s a perfect example of how if you work together, the little you have can explode, and the world can see it, you know. There is a Swahili saying, haba na haba hujaza kibaba, each and every granting council, little by little fills the basket. It’s such a shining example, it’s one of the things I like to say. As I said, you wear many hearts, and you’re an executive member of the OWSD meaning you’re also pushing for women in science, engendering the higher education ecosystem. So, you are an executive committee member of the OWSD South Africa chapter.

Could you share the significance of promoting women in science, especially in the context of developing nations? What challenges and opportunities do you foresee in promoting gender equality and inclusivity within the scientific community, especially in the context of developing countries, also, do you see the intersectionality of gender and science impacting the research landscape in Africa?

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Oh, so this is an absolute passion of mine, right?

Joy Owango:

Yes.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Everyone who’s ever heard me speak with regard to gender issues knows that I’m very much a proclaimed feminist. I believe in the fact that I matter and that I matter equally, and because I believe that, I want to also make sure that in the areas where I’m in, where I’m serving, where I have been positioned, that I can make sure and catalyze that other women matter and they also matter equally, right? So, I think that women in science, I don’t dwell on the challenges. I think everyone knows that the research is limited in areas…

Joy Owango:

Low citations, less citations.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Yes, that you know, 30% of us have got PhDs on the continent. I mean, the challenges are real.

Joy Owango:

We know, yes, we know.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

That in leadership positions, there are glass cliffs and glass ceilings and whatever else we have talked about.

Joy Owango:

Slippery glass stairs.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Yes, all of those challenges. They are real. They are the lived experiences of so many women. But for me, when I started in my understanding of what this challenge on gender and science is on women, and I do like to say that my specific focus is on women. So women in science, because that is what my lived experience is. And I can speak to that lived experience.  I think that there has been so much focus on the numbers. What are the numbers and what do we do to increase the numbers? And sometimes the focus on the numbers has tended to focus on, what should the women change? What do we need to change in how women are engaging in science, change themselves, right? Yeah, so that they can be able to fit into this. So, we offer mentoring, and women are over-mentored. We must learn how to write grants, and we offer writing workshops and science communication workshops and all that. For me, as somebody who is deeply interested in institutional capacity strengthening, I have come to understand and value the importance of changing institutions. You can mentor and over-mentor. You can send me to as many training workshops as you can to prepare me. But if the granting system does not take into consideration and integrate my own experiences, I will still not get grants. That if the system does not take into consideration all of the unconscious bias I still will not get the grant.

If the editors of journals are not thinking about unconscious bias, I will still not be able to get those citations that we are looking for. So, the problem has never been about the women, the problem is about the institutions. And how do we change institutions so that they become these spaces that are safe, that are inclusive, that are supportive of women in science, right? We start by thinking about what our policies are. What is the transformational change that I want to see here at the NRF, so that the NRF supports women scientists who are coming to engage in our funding programs? I want to see that our calls have got inclusive language. I want to see that we are offering unconscious bias training to the people who are reviewing our grants. I want to see that we are consistently using the data that is coming out and the analytics of that data. I want to see that we are understanding that data so that we know where the gaps are, and if needed that, we must put in special programs, strategic programs that encourage women to specifically, if it’s chairs or centers of excellence, or whatever it is, to be able to pick up on those specific funding opportunities and to be able to document the ways in which we are consciously engaging in the transformational changes of policy, systems and processes.

We also…people who are working in these institutions, because they’re the ones who constitute the panels. They are the ones who are writing together the calls for proposals and all that. And I’m using the funding agency model as an example of how you can shift an institution, because I am in one. I have come to embrace that is the space where change actually needs to take place. Yes, I’m not diminishing that there is support that is required to increase the number of women. But to what end? That’s the question, and that’s where I am finding my focus a whole lot more on is, how do I, how do I engender conversations within the organization and the spaces where I’m in the SGCI, for us to be able to think about policy systems and processes that integrate gender and inclusivity better, so that we can be the change in our institutions that we want to see and catalyze within the systems where we are embedded in.

Joy Owango:

And you know what you’re saying is right. In November last year, I was at the Going Global conference in Edinburgh. I was one of the speakers, and in my session, was the Director General, one of the African granting councils, and the issue of gender came up and he said that, yes, we have a call set aside just specifically for women, but we are still not getting women applying. And my answer to him was, how gender sensitive was your calls? Because women make decisions, not because the money is there, there are so many factors that would influence why a woman is going to take up a project and go for three years and not be near her family. She won’t make the decision very lightly. It had never crossed their minds. I told them, make your calls gender sensitive, because the reality is that woman scientist is a caregiver. She’s a mother, she has more roles than her male peers. If you make it gender sensitive, you have more women applying for it. It’s not because you have money a set aside and you assume they will apply for it. They chose not to because it’s not going to still help them. You know, they need to be focused on their work and not be worried about family. So, making them gender-sensitive, and it’s about systemic change. I get where you’re coming from, there’s so much we can do about empowering women by now, we are much more aware, but now it’s about engendering the system such that it is friendly. I’m not saying you coddle us. We are tough as nails, but engender the system so that it is much more equitable so that we can have a leveling playing field with our male peers. I’m really proud of what you are doing.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

That is why am proud of the approach of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, and their partners have taken about how we think about gender and inclusivity in the SGCI. We are thinking with the individuals that are in the granting councils. We are looking at the policies and the systems. We are also commissioning research to understand what’s going on in the system and recognizing that if you don’t change the way that the individual in the science granting council feels about gender and inclusivity, there’s no way that you can expect them to change the way that they’re going to do things when it comes to engendering that. I’m very proud and encourage everyone that is going to be listening to this to really look up the gender and inclusivity project of the HSRC and specifically the approach that they are using in the SGCI to walk the journey together with councils to get exactly this the kind of change that you’ve just been talking about Joy.

Joy Owango:

Right. So now continuing on the theme of your involvement in global initiatives, how has your participation in the Global Research Council, the GRC influenced the NRF’s approach to promoting gender equality within local academia, and what specific initiatives have you championed to address gender disparities in research funding?

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Joy, I am probably the biggest fan of the Global Research Council, and the funding agency movement on the continent. My colleagues will tell you that I speak about the GRC all the time. I’ll tell you why I’m a fan of the GRC. The GRC provides us with such a unique opportunity to be able to tap into the wisdom, the resources, the practices, the experiences of other public funding agencies across the world. There are at least 65 funding agencies that are voluntarily participating in the work of the GRC, and I have found that the lessons that we get from sharing the experiences are so valuable to bring them back into our organization at the NRF, so that we can utilize the statements of principles that we are endorsing to make our work at the NRF even better. Since I’ve joined the NRF, it has produced a number of documents that I think are so important, a lot have been informed by they have found effects in the way that we are discussing about our experiences in the GRCs, we have a transformation document that really speaks to how do we change the equity profiles of resources in South Africa, and it speaks to issues of redress within the organization in the system. Very recently, we now have an equality, diversity and inclusion framework that was informed very much by the work that the GRC did in 2015 -2016 around the equality and status of women in research globally. The NRF has released an impact framework document that infuses all of these components in place to think about what do we mean by impact, and what do we expect of impact from our funded projects, and what do we mean by impact within our system ourselves. For me, the value of the GRC has been definitely in sharing the experiences, but being able to just connect so much better with our funding agency counterparts, wherever we are in the world. The gender working group that I served on of the GRC was one of the most transformational experiences that I ever had, because I just learned we’re, you know sometimes you’re in the organization, and you don’t realize that you’re trailblazing in some areas and you also don’t realize where your gaps are, right? Until you sit in a room and people are struggling, for example, on how to change the racial profiles of their research the students and you’re like oh, this is how we’ve done it in South Africa since the NRF was established. Like we can’t run away from it, right? Then we realize there’s a gap here about how we are integrating gender and sex as part of our proposals. Let’s learn from our Canadian colleagues on how they’ve been doing this, or our colleagues from the German Research Foundation. It’s been absolutely powerful to be able to connect with those colleagues in that way, and to really do that cross pollination of learning.

Joy Owango:

Okay, so how do you envision the long-term impact of these global collaborations on shaping the policies and practices of funding agencies, especially in addressing gender disparities within academic research, and are there specific milestones or changes you anticipate in the coming years.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

I am filled with optimism. I think you know me by now, that is like my second name, right? Yeah, I’m filled optimism for a number of reasons. The first one is that there is a growing recognition and appreciation that funding agencies definitely have a catalytic and strategic area to focus on and when it comes to the integration of gender and inclusivity. The GRC has released a number of documents now where we either sharing experiences or we are endorsing and appreciating how important this is and also saying that these are the areas that we wanted to see the funding agencies work better on. So, I can see in coming years that we are going to definitely have a lot more integrated gender and inclusivity in our research and grants management processes, that we will have all councils that are issuing policies on sexual harassment of funded projects and funded PIs outside of the organization, we will have more funding agencies that are collecting gender disaggregated data and making that public. We will have more funding agencies that are considering the powerful use of strategic programs to increase numbers and to increase uptake of opportunities. We’ll have more granting councils that are really reflecting on, how do we utilize the CV? Because this is area women are penalized very often. Where we can have more narrative CVs that explain, I took six months off because I needed to go and care for my child, or I needed to up my skillset in a specific area and that is not considered as a negative, but rather as an addition to the rapporteur of skill set which a woman has. So, I have a lot of optimism about the role of funding agencies to be able to do that. For me as a woman scientist who has been embedded in this idea of supporting the ecosystem. I am also excited that as we work in this area of research support, that there is greater conversations about how institutions need to change, how our research offices can support women scientists better, how departments of science and innovation or ministries need to put together policies that are gender inclusivity integrated. We are having those kinds of discussions because it’s only when we embrace the ecosystem approach that we will be able to support the transformation that is required even more, even better.

Joy Owango:

And now, what are your parting shorts?

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

My parting shorts?

I think that we are in the greatest continent in the world. A continent that has raised trailblazers, and we continue to trailblaze in many, many different ways.

Joy Owango:

And also, a very resilient continent.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

We are a very resilient continent. I’m very proud to be contributing to shaping the way in which the African science system story, the African research systems story, is being told through the work that I can support at the NRF, through the programs that the NRF is contributing to, through my own additional work about how we advance the science system and the research system on the continent. I think that women matter and women matter equally, and that there’s a whole mindset shift that needs to be endorsed, embraced, especially by our leadership, to recognize that mattering equally also means that institutions have reckon with, the policy changes, the system changes, the mindset shifts that needs to happen.

And my last parting short is that capacity strengthening is a really powerful way of contributing to the way that the African continent continues to be great, and so the ways in which institutions on the continent can change that shift to support women and to support African science, higher education and research even better, and I am so proud that I continue to walk this path, as I think about it from a science-policy interface perspective, think about it from a woman in science perspective, and as I think about it from an institutional capacity, strengthening perspective and bringing all of that together.

Joy Owango:

Thank you so much. Dorothy, this was a fantastic interview. I enjoyed myself.

Dr. Dorothy Ngila:

Thank you very much for having me so it was such a delight and so easy and so wonderful to connect with you again.

Joy Owango:

Same here.

Outro

Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of Mazungumzo podcast. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on all our channels for more updates and for candid stories by researchers, policymakers, higher education leaders, and innovators on your journeys. See you in our next episode.

Listen to the full episode and explore more episodes from the #Mazungumzo- African Scholarly Conversations podcast on the following platforms:

• Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2140692/15434236

• Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/episode/0mtu0qGNdmAjpx9qA38ahu?si=43bfef9b6c6d42ae

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sn-2-ep-10-engendering-africas-research-ecosystem-dr/id1652483621?i=1000662614951

• TuneIn (Available Globally): http://tun.in/tBV1rH

• Player FM (Available Globally: https://player.fm/series/mazungumzo-african-scholarly-conversations

• TCC Africa-Training Centre in Communication News Room (Available Globally): https://www.tcc-africa.org/category/mazungumzo-podcasts/

Listen, Learn, and Share! Let’s amplify the voice of African scholarly contributions.

#Sciencecommunication

#researchvisibility

#Sciencecommunication #researchvisibility