Creating a sustainable research culture in computer science targeting agriculture, health, finance and transport is a fundamental pillar towards making Kenya become a high middle income economy.

For this reason, ACTS in collaboration with California Polytechnic State University, has been implementing a project on supporting STEM research cultures in Africa - Building institutional capacity for computing research in Kenya (CB4ICTD). The project is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

The project specifically aims to co-create and evaluate ini-tial programs that address institutional barriers to building research capacity and conduct further policy-relevant re-search to advance knowledge about institutional capacity building and better understand how the pilot strategy might be applied to other STEM fields and African countries.

The project is anchored on three pillars which include industrial fellowships where computing faculty members spend 3 - 6 months in a firm conducting a collaborative research project; industrial studentships which enables faculty to retain their best students to work on research projects; and Postdoctoral fellowships where recently graduated PhDs serve as postdoctoral fellows in departments to strengthen the research functions of a university.

The CB4ICTD project has demonstrated that institutional and structural factors such as university and departmental structures and strategies, and the relationship between a university and the private sector strongly influence research-er productivity and research impact. The fellowship beneficiaries engaged industry on their re-search and used the academia industry linkages to develop grant proposals that provided pathways to scale their re-search to impact the society. So far, 6 policy briefs and 4 blogs have been developed in various STEM fields.

More information about the project can be accessed here.