Abstract

Sustainable and equitable transnational research networks have become more crucial now than ever, because global challenges are transnational and efforts to address them will require innovative, equitable and sustainable partnerships between the global north and the global south. The AU-EU Innovation Agenda 1 sets out a path towards more and better collaboration between researchers and institutions in the Africa and Europe through a jointly developed framework of priority R&I themes to be funded, and principles of collaboration they commit to support. Motivated by this groundbreaking intercontinental agreement, two university networks from Africa and Europe (the African Research Universities Alliance and The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities) leveraged their partnership to support the Agenda by forming the Africa-Europe Clusters of Research Excellence (CoRE)2. This initiative represents an innovative way to carry out global collaboration in an unequal world, addressing key societal and scientific challenges in Europe and Africa while emphasizing inclusion, equity, brain circulation and capacity building, as well as the co-creation of new knowledge. A partnership that initially started as a top-down concept between the African and European university leaders has culminated in seed-funded research collaborations on-the-ground, with ten-year timeframes, led by over 250 participating academics based in 42 countries.

The Africa-Europe CoRE will be presented as a good practice model to illustrate how equitable and sustainable R&I partnerships can be forged and continually improved between universities in the global north and south; empowering academics to overcome structural barriers in pursuit of excellence. It represents transnational networks that aligns with funding policy and supports the performance of research in an equitable and sustainable manner that we believe will lead to more societal and scientific impact.

Learning outcomes will include insights into the transnational network formation approach followed and concrete examples of how the CoREs are allowing researchers and research managers to make bottom-up contributions to the Agenda: for example, co-creating excellent research projects, promoting long-term sustainability, forging collaborative doctoral programmes and forming of a transnational community of practice and capacity development of Research Management and Administration (RMA) professionals who are supporting the CoREs.

1. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-07/ec_rtd_au-eu-innovation-
agenda-final-version.pdf
2. https://arua.org/wp-content/uploads/CoRE-booklet-rationale.pdf