Our Founder and President
Professor Sir Tumani Corrah, KBE, MRG, MD, PhD, FRCP, PWACP, FAAS, Emeritus Director.
Professor Corrah is the Founder of AREF and the first Emeritus Director of the UK Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
For over 30 years Professor Corrah, who is Gambian, has pursued three passions: improving outcomes of inpatient care in challenging environments, research into diseases that impact the developing world disproportionately, and building human capacity in health research in West, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa.
Professor Corrah is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and is a member of over twenty scientific board and committee groups worldwide.
AREF’s Story
Professor Corrah founded the Africa Research Excellence Fund in September 2015, supported by the UK Medical Research Foundation.
Throughout his thirty-year career in health research and leadership, Professor Corrah had been exposed to many grant-award bodies and committees which highlighted the challenges that emerging African health researchers face. These include a lack of essential opportunities to develop research ideas, compete on an international level to win research funding, or access world-class research advisors and mentors.
Professor Corrah founded AREF to support the careers of the new generation of African researchers, giving them the stepping stones needed to become outstanding research leaders in their respective fields, ensuring that talent is retained in Africa to address the continent’s unique health research needs. In early 2021, AREF was officially registered as a charitable company, established its own Board of Trustees, and Professor Corrah took on the role as President and Executive Chair.
Our Main Initiatives
Our fellowships provide African researchers with experience of state-of-the-art research methodologies in world-class research environments to help them build their research network, attend workshops and conferences, and learn from research leaders in their field.
Our grant-writing workshops equip African researchers with the confidence, knowledge and support required to win competitive funding from international funders.
Our leadership programmes equip African researchers with the knowledge and expertise required to be future leaders in their field, to form equitable, international collaborations and, ultimately, to help define the continent’s health agenda and research priorities.
“When I founded AREF in 2015, I never imagined the impact we would have in our first five years. In this short time, we have provided potentially life-changing opportunities to over 250 researchers across Africa, setting them on the path to leading their own research teams within the continent.”
Looking to the future
Looking forward, we want to see exponential growth in the numbers of African scientists participating in our fellowships, workshops and leadership programmes. More than ever before we need a community of African scientists who can deliver world-class research, in collaboration with international partners, to help prevent, detect and rapidly respond to threats to global health.
Our vision is of an inspired, committed, and talented community of researchers in Africa leading world-class research and participating equitably in international research endeavors for health and wellbeing.
Science is flourishing in parts of Africa. Thanks to improved investment in PhD training programmes, a new generation of talented and dynamic African health researchers is emerging.
However, this boost in training investment is not matched by opportunities for early-career researchers aiming to develop their own research ideas, and take the next steps in their career.
Many researchers cannot access essential opportunities needed to develop compelling research ideas, access world-class advisors and mentors, build and manage collaborations, win scarce funding and eventually lead their own research team.
Career barriers like these obstruct the transition from an emerging, postdoctoral researcher to an independently thinking researcher pursuing their own life-saving ambitions. It means many of the brightest young stars are being held back in their ambitions, tempted abroad or out of research and into other sectors.
This loss of talent is to Africa’s detriment, because African researchers are well equipped to meet the challenges of improving health in their country. Their linguistic knowledge, understanding of social and cultural challenges and appreciation of how technology can best be used gives them crucial expertise that could be harnessed to benefit their local communities and beyond.
Our values
- We focus on people-oriented capacity development
- We nurture talent to excellence
- We seek equity and inclusivity in the global research agenda
- We promote partnership
Our mission
Our mission is to nurture, mentor, and support a community of researchers across Africa to become research experts and leaders, capable of tackling African and global health challenges.
To stem the loss of young talent and nurture Africa as the next hub for global science and research, our focus is on supporting emerging health researchers in the early stages of their career – specifically those who have received their PhD within the last six years.
We provide outstanding postdoctoral researchers with great opportunities to strengthen technical and transferable skills, extend their professional relationships, and develop high-quality and competitive research ideas and proposals to become tomorrow’s leaders.
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