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Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with a current median age below 19. By 2050, over a third of the world’s youth (aged 15 to 24) will be African. It is imperative these young people have access to high quality education, both to tackle their own continent’s challenges and to ensure Africa is represented in areas like climate change and AI which are likely to drastically affect humankind’s future. Africa’s youth represent a huge, largely untapped pool of talent whose entry into advanced science and technology is both an exciting prospect and an important opportunity for the world.

The University of Edinburgh and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Africa’s leading postgraduate institution in the mathematical sciences, are developing a partnership which will enable PhD students at AIMS centres in Africa (in Cameroon, Ghana, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa) to be co-supervised by an academic at Edinburgh. The partnership will support PhD students at AIMS to visit and study at Edinburgh for up to 3 months per year, during each year of their PhD. The partnership will also enable academics at Edinburgh to visit Africa to lecture and to collaborate on research projects with AIMS scientists on topics including climate change, mathematical ecology and epidemiology, pure mathematics, theoretical physics and cosmology, informatics and bioinformatics, quantum computation and machine learning.

Academics in Edinburgh who are interested in co-supervising PhD students at AIMS were invited to attend the workshop. Besides introducing AIMS’ researchers and their work to colleagues at Edinburgh, the workshop focused on producing a detailed plan to support around 40 African PhD students visiting Edinburgh every year, across all Schools in the College of Science and Engineering as well as other Centres in the University.

The AIMS-Edinburgh partnership intended to serve as a pilot and proof of concept for similar partnership programs between African institutions and international partner institutions around the world. Conservatively, as many as 500 international Universities could eventually be involved. By scaling up this PhD co-supervision partnership program, thousands of African PhDs could be trained each year. This would not only transform Africa’s development prospects, it would transform maths and science themselves.