Capacity-building has been central to RECIRCULATE with over 460 African academics/professionals trained from 14 African countries through physical face-to-face workshops, physical residencies at Lancaster University and physical regional annual symposia. This equates to 2,876 person training days in the last 2.5 years.

Against a backdrop of sustained engagement with African stakeholders, the aim of this work funded through the British Council-funded Digital University Africa programme was to conduct action research around the development of an exemplar digital training programme that will ‘stimulate entrepreneurial thinking in scientists’ (SETS) in Africa.

We worked with 5 African partners (University of Benin (UNIBEN) in Nigeria, Igbinedion University in Nigeria (IUO), Lancaster University Ghana, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Ghana and Kenyatta University (KU) in Kenya) to undertake the scoping, co-design and piloting activities and are grateful for their enthusiastic support, contributions and insights.

The development of the SETS Digital Place-Based Delivery Framework (see figure below) and accompanying Toolkit will empower institutions across Africa to develop their own entrepreneurial capacity as well as design their own programmes that create impactful collaborative solutions to place-based challenges.