Africans’ experiences of international PhDs: making sense of a spectrum of career mobility trajectories

ABSTRACT

Globally, countries often view PhD training as building research capacity and may encourage international mobility of potential PhDs as they expect them to return home – not considering individuals as agents negotiating their own intentions. We examined the interaction between such structural factors and 36 PhD graduates’ efforts (from 13 African countries) to negotiate their intentions, particularly around international mobility as they navigated international, national, organisational and day-to-day factors in three periods. Shifts in focus occurred: a) Pre-PhD: international factors around finding a place; b) PhD: host country (national through day-to-day) factors in negotiating a time-limited experience; c) Post-PhD: focus on longer-term, with difference between those returning home and those away (elsewhere in Africa or beyond). Nine trajectories emerged, highlighting the variation in how individuals negotiated asymmetrically within distinct structural factors to advance their careers. Implications for future research as well as policy and practice are explored.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• region
• mobility
• biographical
• structural perspective
• PhD graduate

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. These require a return home for a number of years.

2. Proportion (in %) of all tertiary students from the host country that move abroad for education.

3. This study draws from Marsh et al. (2016) about Africans’ undergraduate, Master’s and PhD experiences in North America.

4. While our original analysis incorporated broader life issues, we limited the focus here to the interaction between agency and structural factors for two reasons: lack of space to present the full analysis and realising that a narrower focus created a clearer account of the shifts in structural factors over time. A paper on personal factors is now under review.

5. Not all do, but the argument developed here relates to those wishing to take up teaching-research posts.

6. One strategic target of the GYA to providing benchmark reports on science policy topics related to the Global State of Young Scientists (GloSYS). The Africa Project team was African-led and the authors of this paper were involved in the bigger project.

7. The survey invited those who: a) had received a Master’s or PhD in the previous 10 years; b) were born in or living in Africa; and c) considered themselves researchers (if only having a Master’s).

8. Northern Africa: Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia; Western Africa: Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal; Eastern Africa: Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda; Southern Africa: Mauritius, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe.

9. While the contexts are permeable, for the purpose of analysis we placed all factors in the one context we felt it most influential, e.g. opportunity for collaboration could be micro-meso, but we coded it micro given day-to-day interaction would create the greatest opportunities.

10. Contacting participants was not feasible.

11. Each cameo includes quotes from their interviews.

12. Discrimination of different kinds was as present in their experiences as was reported by all participants during their degrees.

13. See Marsh et al. (2016) for other institutional recommendations.