The need for more doctoral graduates is frequently noted as central to South Africa’s ability to join globalised ‘knowledge economies’. Compared to other emerging economies South Africa’s output of doctoral graduates is particularly low. Rhodes and the project team have secured funding from the 'Erasmus+' to enhance the doctoral supervision course to drive the doctoral graduate numbers.
A report published by the Academy of Science, showed that South Africa produces only 23 to 27 doctoral graduates per million of the population compared to, for example, 52 per million in Brazil, another developing nation and 288 in the United Kingdom. One of the recommendations of this same report, and of other similar pieces of work, is that one way to enhance the production of doctoral graduates is to enhance the quality of research supervision.
In 2011, Rhodes University received EUR 1million worth of funding from the Dutch government to lead a project which would do just this through the development of course on doctoral supervision. The course has now been offered more than 31 times at universities across South Africa.
The original project involved Vrije University in Amsterdam, Fort Hare University, the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Cape Town. Such was the success of this original project that the Department of Higher Education and Training provided an additional R4.5 million worth of funding to allow the project to continue.
Additional funding has been received from the European Union’s ‘Erasmus+’ funding initiative. One of the original aims of the course, which holds a Creative Commons ‘not for profit with attribution’ license, is that universities would eventually be able to offer it for their own staff without external assistance. New funding from Erasmus+ will allow the project team to focus on the ‘train the trainer’ aspect of the course to build capacity to do this. The new funding will also see other South African universities, most notably the University of the Western Cape, the University of KwaZulu Natal, join the project which has also been extended through the inclusion of Edinburgh and Bochum universities.
For more information on the course visit doctoralsupervison.net