Translating academic learnings to real-world solutions

Written by Avni Gupta. Posted in Alumni Profiles, Blog, General, News

The internet has become an integral part of our lives, which has only intensified during these times of self-isolation and social distancing. Terrens Muradzikwa, a digital entrepreneur from Zimbabwe and an MBA student at Said Business School on the Rhodes scholarship, talks to us about the impact of digital technologies in Africa and the creation of the Zimbabwe Covid-19 Support Hub.

We live in a time, which some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a period that is transforming our lives, reshaping the economy and changing the social and cultural contexts in which we live. Terrens interest in the role of the internet and digital technologies in society and economics, led him to Oxford to study for a MSc in Social Science Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute combined with a MBA from the Said Business School (through the Oxford 1+1 MBA).

 “I believe that digital technologies, when carefully managed, can improve people’s economic lives. For example, they can increase accessibility of financial services to millions of people without formal banking facilities and also facilitate flow of information between small-scale businesses, thereby increasing trade and access to markets.”

-Terrens Muradzikwa

Terrens’ research included regulation of the mobile money industry in Kenya, impact of internet access and lack thereof in the developing world, and the effects of digital technologies on economic development. Now as an MBA student, he is exploring the application of his research in the business and finance world.

Concerned about the spread of fake news about Covd-19 in Zimbabwe and limited access to reliable information about the virus, Terrens co-initiated the Zimbabwe Covid-19 Support Hub with four more students in Oxford and other Zimbabweans based in the country, Botswana, Germany and the UK. The website aims to provide accurate information and facts about the virus from government agencies, the WHO, and doctors. The information is translated to threelocal languages to support public awareness. The website has reached over 200,000 people in Zimbabwe and bought together 30 volunteers across the world, working virtually to support and amplify local efforts to respond to Covid-19 by sharing information, contacts, and by pooling in one place community fund-raising efforts.

“I urge everyone to contribute in ways they are comfortable with. This can be checking on fellow students and work colleagues, sharing tips with family and friends, providing economic support for those severely impacted by the lockdowns and carrying out important medical research. We will get through this together.”

-Terrens Muradzikwa

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AfOx awards 200 Travel Grants

Written by Avni Gupta. Posted in AfOx Travel Grant recipients, Blog, General, News

This month, we awarded the 200^th Travel Grant since our establishment in 2016. The AfOx Travel Grants represent a breadth of emerging research collaborations between researchers based in African institutions and the University of Oxford.  

Initiated with the aim of supporting new collaborations between researchers based in African institutions and the University of Oxford, the AfOx Travel Grants are open to all disciplines, all year round. They allow researchers to meet in either Oxford or an African institution to work together on a collaborative project. 

The AfOx Travel Grants were initiated in August 2016. One of the first Grants was awarded to facilitate a collaboration between the Epilepsy Support Foundation in Zimbabwe and the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford.  

“The AfOx Travel Grant has quite literally, changed the entire focus of the Oxford Epilepsy Research Group. It contributed significantly to our being awarded a £4.9 million grant from NIHR to study epilepsy in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Taurai Kadzviti, National Epilepsy Foundation, Zimbabwe and Arjune Sen and Sloan Mahone, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford  

Since then, we have awarded 200 Travel Grants that have led to research collaborations between 114 African institutions from 32 countries and 70 Oxford based departments.

“I came here to build a new bridge between my home institution in Egypt & the University of Oxford for cutting-edge research in studying genetics and cancer cells.” 

Haitham Shaban, National Research Centre Egypt

Such collaborations have facilitated new breakthroughs in the fields of medical sciences, big data engineering and astrophysics, conserving environments and ecosystems, archaeology, and preservation of ancient languages amongst other research areas.

“The AfOx travel scheme is such a valuable way of bringing together researchers to explore cross-disciplinary work together.” 

Maureen Kelley, Big Data Institute, University of Oxford  

 “The travel grant provided me access to cutting-edge academic research, resources and literature that I may not have had access to otherwise.”

Gill Black, Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation, South Africa 

To apply for a AfOx Travel Grant visit:
http://www.afox.ox.ac.uk/grants/

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Joining the dots between the classroom and hospital

Written by Avni Gupta. Posted in Alumni Profiles, General, News

This week we caught up with Dr Mona Ibrahim. A medical Doctor from Sudan, Mona has just started her new role as a Research Officer at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University after the successful completion of the Masters in International Health and Tropical Medicine.

Mona, who describes herself as “a happy human, with a touch of sarcasm”, gives us a snippet of her life in Oxford, the differences in the learning cultures and her vision in ensuring universal health coverage is a reality in Sudan.

Mona completed her medical degree from the University of Medical Sciences and Technology in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. As part of her training, she took up a life-changing internship at the Um-Dawanban hospital in the outskirts of Khartoum.

The Um-Dawanban hospital covers the town of Um-Dawanban along with four villages in the area, providing medical facilities for a population of 500,000 people. A community with distinctive features from the other predominantly inhibits each village. Mona experienced a beautiful diversity of cultures, traditions and beliefs within the simple building of the Um-Dawanban hospital.

Mona treated patients with nutrient deficiencies, common infections and some who had injuries from road accidents. As

“As a doctor in that region, it was interesting to see how such a diverse set of people had binding commonalities. Everyday at sunset, all the hospital staff- from cleaners to financial managers would come together at the doctor’s office and have coffee and tea together. Those were my favourite moments; it felt like we were family”

However, one thing that stood out for Mona was the clear discrepancies between what she had studied and what she was observing at work.

“As students, we were taught the most idealised version of Medicine. We became very familiar with books that highlighted the latest evidence-based management guidelines. However, with little to no management skills at the hospital, the official international guidelines were nothing but a pretty poster on the wall.”

The gap between the ideal and the reality became Mona’s career-focus and she decided to apply for the MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine in Oxford.

The MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine is a full-time one-year course that explores a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to health in resource-limited contexts. The aim of the course is to develop an understanding of the major global health problems in resource-limited settings and study potential solutions from different disciplinary perspectives such as the ethics, social determinants of health, mathematical modelling and economical evaluations.

The diverse student network of the course, leadership and communications training provided and international placements offered were particularly attractive to Mona.  

Moving to Oxford for her graduate studies was an adventure in itself for Mona. It was the first time she was living by herself amongst other lifestyle changes. The student-led learning and emphasis on critical appraisals was quite different from her previous training, and the college system was both novel and confusing. One of her toughest challenges to overcome in Oxford was the need the match the high expectations and to fit in.

However soon Mona learned to question things like people’s positions, contextual factors and even her own opinions and inherent biases. She learned to embrace her quirky self and to keep pushing to become a better version of herself.

“The knowledge I’ve learnt was just one of many benefits I’ve gained from this course. It taught me to consider the depth of underlying issues that surround health problems. My colleagues came from all around the world and from a range of career backgrounds- it was fascinating to hear their perspectives and see how they solves problems differently. The diversity was beautiful. This environment encouraged me to think at a larger scale, instead of simply seeing a problem through my medical scope”

Since completing her degree, Mona has started working as a Research Officer for the UKRI GCRF Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents (Accelerate) Hub embedded in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University. Supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund, the aim of the Adolescent’s Hub is to improve outcomes for 20 million adolescents in 34 countries across Africa. Mona is responsible for the Hub’s engagement with the United Nations Development Program to ensure that policy makers consider the evidence provided by the Hub.

 “I believe in my country and in its potential. Through the next few years I aim to become qualified enough to work in health policy. I would like to promote the strategies encouraging universal health coverage and health-in-all policies. I know that Sudan will grow, prosper and become a great nation- I hope to be a part of that.”

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Studying and preserving Ethiopian treasures

Written by Avni Gupta. Posted in Alumni Profiles, Blog, General, News

This week we caught up with Jacopo Gnisci, Researcher of illuminated manuscripts at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Classics. His research focuses on Ethiopian and Eritrean art, theology and culture between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. 

Jacopo is one of the ten recipients of Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship that is jointly awarded by the GETTY Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). He will use this fellowship opportunity to work on a book that deals with illuminated Ethiopic manuscripts produced approximately between the years 1270 and 1400.

AfOx: Can you describe your research for us?

Jacopo: Most of my work focuses on cultural artefacts produced within the Ethiopian empire between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries. I am interested in understanding how the formal features of these objects were shaped by material factors, socio-cultural dynamics, and exchanges with other cultures. By highlighting the complex theological significance of certain artworks, I also hope to highlight the creative role of Ethiopian artists and show that the commonly expressed view that they were able, at best, to slavishly copy subjects is pure nonsense.

AfOx: How did you choose the field of Ethiopian and Eritrean art?

Jacopo: I first travelled to Ethiopia in my mid-teens and it was a revelation. I remember enjoying the people’s friendliness towards me and the breath-taking landscapes, but above all I was struck by the devotion of the Christian communities. About ten years later, when I was studying for my MA and had to pick an area to focus on, Ethiopia sprung to my mind as a good option. And, in the very instant in which I thought about it, I had a sort of epiphany and realized that this was an area of research I could devote myself to, it was a bit like love at first sight.

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AfOx: What excites you the most in the work you do?

Jacopo: Just one thing? Gosh. Again, I think love is the emotion which best expresses my feelings towards my work, and I consider myself very lucky to be involved in something I really enjoy. I take great pleasure in just looking at the art, but if I had to single something out, I would say that I like trying to understand some of the theological messages that are embedded in it. Examining, or at least attempting to understand, the political aspects and religious values that shaped the creation of visual culture in Ethiopia in the past is a thrilling experience, it is as close as we can get to time travelling!

AfOx: What is the one challenge you are trying to solve by working in this field?

Jacopo: Since the 1960s Western scholarship has made a lot of progress in understanding how colonial ideology affected 20th-century literature of non-Western cultures such as those of Africa. However, when dealing with African traditions one still one come across a great deal of prejudice, even among colleagues. When I read or hear disparaging remarks about the artistic traditions of Ethiopia and Eritrea, I get quite annoyed, but I do my best to point it out politely, since I realise how easy it is to be unaware of our own biases. Over the years, you would be surprised to hear how often I have been told that Ethiopian artists were not as accomplished or creative as Western artists. I typically reply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that I personally find some fifteenth-century Ethiopian icons far more beautiful than any Mona Lisa or Sistine Chapel. So, I guess you could say my main aim is to challenge negative representations of Ethiopian and Eritrean art and to get people to be more interested in the subject.

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AfOx: Do you work in collaboration with African researchers? Can you describe the work that you do together?

Jacopo: I have had the fortune to work with some excellent scholars from Ethiopia and Eritrea on more than one occasion. In the past couple of years, the Faculty of Classics has been collaborating with the Bodleian Library and with members of the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities in the UK to raise awareness about their fascinating traditions through a series of initiatives that have included conferences, talks, and displays of material. The exhibition of Ethiopic manuscripts currently on display at the Bodleian Library, brought me into closer contact with these communities and it was a great experience, I learned a lot. The initiatives I mentioned also included the publication of a volume entitled, Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I worked on the volume with several colleagues including the Ethiopian scholar Girma Getahun who is known for his work on Ethiopic Chronicles. We exchanged views on how to best present the material to a non-specialised audience in a way that was informed but also engaging. I am glad I had the opportunity to meet him as a result of this collaboration, because he is one of the nicest people I ever worked with and I hope we will stay in touch in the future.

In partnership with Ethiopian researchers, Jacopo has also co-authored and edited a book on some of the manuscripts on display at the exhibit. The book ‘Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford’ can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Treasures-Ethiopia-Eritrea-Bodleian-Library/dp/0995494657

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Preserving indigenous languages

Written by Avni Gupta. Posted in AfOx Fellows, General, News

Audrey Mbogho is from the Wadawida community of about 400,000 people in South-Eastern Kenya, who speak the language of Kidawida. 

Audrey recalls being punished in school for speaking her mother tongue – Kidawida. Teachers thought that speaking native languages in school was a ‘terrible vice’ that interfered with learning English.

Audrey’s parents were both teachers and they encouraged Audrey to be multilingual. She grew up perfecting three languages: Kidawida, English and Swahili, and developed a passion for languages. 

Now, decades later, because of the size of the Wadawida community and the discouragement of younger people from speaking Kidawida, the language is at risk of extinction.

Audrey is currently the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Pwani University in Kilifi Kenya. In June 2018, Audrey visited Oxford for two months as an AfOx-TORCH Visiting Fellow.

She used the Fellowship opportunity to create a web-based platform called “Ngano”, the Kidawida word for “Stories”. Ngano will use crowdsourcing technologies to allow Kidawida speakers to contribute short stories and audio recordings in their language. Ngano allows Kidawida speakers to contribute children’s stories, news articles, recipes, songs and other fictional and non-fictional writings to preserve the language and culture of the Wadawida.

Audrey created the platform in collaboration with colleagues from The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics at Oxford University.

“There is great value in preserving languages. When you preserve a language, you preserve a culture. You preserve stories, history and knowledge. You are able to use google voice to search for a location in English, but you cannot do it in your mother tongue. That is a disadvantage. I want to equalise the playing field for everyone. There should not be some languages that are considered better than others.”

Audrey has had the idea of developing the platform for many years. However, being the Chair of her department at Pwani University as well as a Lecturer means she has two full time jobs.

“This is the first time in four years that I have been able to work on a research project of my own instead of the routine work that I do at home – preparing lessons, supervising students, signing documents and other admin tasks. So this has been an amazing opportunity to work on a project I have wanted to do desperately”

Back in Kenya, Audrey is now exploring funding sources to promote the project within communities and high schools. She plans to host workshops and encourage people to write short stories for the Ngano platform.

Languages are dying at a very rapid pace. There are around 7000 languages in the world today, however roughly 40% of languages are considered endangered, with less than 1,000 speakers remaining.

Audrey hopes that other language preservation efforts can use similar crowd sourcing platform to keep pace with the threat of loss. The availability of data will create opportunities for postgraduates to take up research in the area of natural language processing for low-resource languages and provide technology-based solutions in this area.

You can view the Ngano platform here: https://kidawida.phon.ox.ac.uk/index.php/Main_Page

Find out more about the AfOx Visiting Fellowship Programme here:
http://www.afox.ox.ac.uk/afox-visiting-fellowships-programme/

Audrey’s publications include:

1. Mbogho, A., & Marquard, S. (2013). Improving the Transcription of Academic Lectures for Information Retrieval. Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA ’13), Miami, Florida, USA (pp. 560-567). New York: IEEE.
2. Kivaisi, A., & Mbogho, A. (2012). Web-based Corpus Acquisition. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU ’12). Cape Town.
3. Mbogho, A., & Katz, M. (2010). The Impact of Accents on Automatic Recognition of South African English Speech: A Preliminary Investigation. Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT ’10), Bela Bela, South Africa (pp. 187-192). New York: ACM.

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Interdisciplinary Research Towards Tackling The SDGs in Africa

Written by Anne. Posted in General

The Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) and the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) are convening a meeting of Affiliates of The AAS, international research leaders, and funders at The University of Oxford. The meeting will take place at Pembroke College from the 6th to the 8th of August, 2018 and will serve as an international platform for African researchers to network, to share their ideas and successes, as well as to seek meaningful collaborations towards scaling their work and impact.

The AAS Affiliates are nominated to their positions in recognition of their academic and research excellence. The AAS through its Affiliates Programme supports them to become exceptional leaders and to deploy their talents towards sustainable development in Africa.

The main goals of the meeting are to:
1. Showcase the research of the Affiliates;
2. Build collaborative and interdisciplinary networks amongst the Affiliates and with Oxford scholars for tackling sustainable development in Africa and;
3. Provide a platform for charting career development pathways through the Affiliates Programme.

The meeting shall achieve these goals through a series of keynote talks, simulation exercises, moderated panels, small groups, and informal networking opportunities. In addition, the Affiliates will work with AAS staff to develop the strategy for the Affiliates Programme over the next five years.


Daily events are open to colleagues from across the university. Please REGISTER BELOW to attend one or more of the daily events


Day One: Monday 6th August
On the first day, affiliates will get to know each other and scholars and academics at Oxford. The morning session will comprise welcome speeches, a key note address, and the first of three Turbo Talks sessions in which all Affiliates will briefly summarise their work and present their ideas on ‘the big questions for Africa’s development’.

Day Two: Tuesday 7th August
The second day will focus on the big picture of Africa’s development challenges and how these can be addressed by interdisciplinary research. The morning will involve keynote talks followed by a moderated panel and audience discussion. Morning sessions and Turbo Talks in the afternoon are open to colleagues from across the university.

Day Three: Wednesday 8th August
The last day of the gathering will focus on the pathways for career development with the aim of addressing SDGs in Africa. The day will start with the third session of Affiliates’ Turbo Talks followed by a moderated session of short talks on grant application processes, research fellowships, working outside academia, innovations, and science communication.





MEETING ORGANIZERS

AFRICA OXFORD INITIATIVE
AfOx was established in 2016 as a platform to bring together information on Oxford’s Africa related activities, to promote engagement with Africa as a strategic priority for the University as a whole and to support the development of equitable and sustainable research and academic partnerships. The strategic priorities for AfOx were developed after a consultative meeting held in October 2016 at the University of Oxford, where academic and research leaders from several African institutions engaged in an exchange of ideas with Oxford colleagues on the role of international collaborations for African academia. AfOx has established a database with around 400 Oxford academics involved in research collaborations with over 125 African institutions, spread across 36 African countries. AfOx provides a vibrant communication platform (http://www.afox.ox.ac.uk/) for researchers both at Oxford University and at partner African institutions and facilitates collaborative research by providing travel grants and Visiting Fellowships designed to enhance academic mobility and network building.

THE AFRICAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
The African Academy of Sciences (AAS) is a pan-African organization, which aims to drive sustainable development in Africa through science technology and innovation. It has a tripartite mandate of pursuing excellence by recognizing scholars and achievers; providing advisory and think tank functions for shaping the continent’s strategies and policies; and implementing key science, technology and innovation programmes. The AAS draws on its fellowship, which comprises around 400 scholars who have reached the highest level of excellence in their field, to engage with governments and policy makers on the continent. The AAS is the only continental academy in Africa, enjoying the support and recognition of NEPAD and the African Union as well as governments and major international partners. In 2015, the AAS launched the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa, a platform created in collaboration with the New Partnership for Africa’s (NEPAD) Agency. AESA is an agenda setting and funding platform to support the development of Africa’s research leadership and promote scientific excellence and innovation to overcome some of Africa’s developmental challenges.

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AfOx Meeting Form

Written by Anne. Posted in General

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Call for Papers: Special Issue on Kenya’s 2017 elections

Written by Anne. Posted in General

Kenya’s new constitution was enacted in 2010; the referendum which endorsed it showed wide popular support for reforms which were intended to make Kenya a more just and equitable society, and to end the ethnicized politics which had led to repeated violence. The constitution, which created new, elected, county-level governments with significant resources of their own, did not come fully into effect until after the 2013 elections; so Kenya’s 2017 elections will be the first test of the electoral consequences of devolution. This special issue, which will be reviewed by the Journal of Eastern African Studies, will bring together new research from a range of disciplines and perspectives to ask whether, and how, devolution really has changed Kenya’s politics. The collection will therefore be about much more than the country’s 2017 elections: it will analyse the most significant institutional change in Kenya’s post-colonial history; and the ways in which, and extent to which, such institutional change fosters substantive change in political culture, or is simultaneously undermined by the same.

Possible themes to be explored in the collection include: the role of governors under the new constitution; the rise of very localized patronage networks around the members of county assemblies; the extent to which the new constitution has succeeded in its apparent aim of institutionalizing political parties and ensuring that they have a presence across the country; how elections reveal the effects of devolution on Kenya’s security agencies; and the workings of the judiciary under the new constitution. The collection will then be framed by an introductory essay in which the editors will draw on their own research, including comparative lessons from elsewhere in Africa. Please note that this means that we are unlikely to be able to accommodate general papers that provide an overview of the election, as these will duplicate the introduction. We are therefore looking for research papers that provide a more in depth analysis of a specific issue.

Those interested in contributing should send a 200 to 300 word abstract to Gabrielle Lynch (g.lynch@warwick.ac.uk) two weeks after the presidential inauguration, and expect to submit full papers of up to 10,000 words including endnotes and a bibliography by early December (with exact dates to be advertised dependent on the final electoral schedule). Please note that all papers will be peer reviewed, and that the selection process for which articles are published will be made by the editors of the Journal of Eastern African Studies. It is unlikely that every paper proposed can be accommodated. For instructions to authors see: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rjea20&page=instructions

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Crossing Boundaries 3 – Conference on Global Health Systems

Written by Anne. Posted in General

Thursday 7th December at Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Said Business School

A conference to showcase Oxford’s multidisciplinary research informing health systems strengthening in LMIC


Invitation to propose a Plenary Presentation

A one-day conference is being planned with support from the Medical and Social Sciences Divisions and organized by a team from across the university . Its aim is to showcase research conducted by multidisciplinary teams from Oxford with partners in or with direct relevance to low and middle income countries’ health and social care systems. This conference aims to promote cross-divisional research collaborations in global health to help achieve the sustainable development goal agenda.

Individuals or groups wishing to present their work (20 minutes presentation, 5 minutes Q&A) are invited to submit a proposed title and up to 200 words description that illustrates the nature and value of their multidisciplinary approach. Joint presentations from individuals representing the collaborative approach taken to addressing complex health and social care systems questions are welcome.

Please download and email presentation outlines using this Presentation Outline Form to kim.monaghan@ndm.ox.ac.uk with the subject heading ‘Crossing Boundaries 3’ Submissions should be received by 30th June 2017

Rapid oral and poster presentations
Individual researchers, particularly those at an early stage of their career and DPhil students, will be invited to submit abstracts at a later date through a specific

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University of Oxford – African Alumni

Written by Anne. Posted in General

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