Challenges and opportunities in East African doctoral supervision

Abstract

In a changing doctoral supervision environment, challenges and opportunities in doctoral supervision need to be better understood to provide the right support for quality doctoral supervision. This paper offers a contextual literature review of the challenges and opportunities in the East African higher education landscape. It is demonstrated that despite the new approaches that have emerged over time on effective doctoral supervision, universities in East Africa still face low graduate completion rates and poor research output. This emerges from key challenges including poor student-supervisor relationships, differences in research orientation between students and their supervisors, and administrative issues including a shortage of doctoral supervisors, high supervisor workload, and inadequate administrative support. Nonetheless, several opportunities for improving doctoral supervision in East Africa are identified including capacity building, collaborative supervision, and leveraging of technology. It is therefore recommended that Universities take advantage of emerging solutions to challenges in doctoral supervision especially inter- university collaboration and capacity-building.