Research support granted for project on PhD education and student motivation in low-income countries
Gabriele Griffin, Professor of gender studies at the Centre for Gender Research, has received research support from the Democracy and Higher Education programme for the project "Democracy, Doctoral Education and Student Motivation in Low-Income Countries: The Case of Mozambique".
The purpose of the project is to understand the gendered motivations of students to undertake doctoral research in a low-income country (LIC) where much such research occurs as a function of international donor programs such as those by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA).
The global democratization of nations depends to a significant extent on raising the educational levels of all populations (Gill, 2017; Stich, 2012) including not least those in LICs (Shtaltovna, 2016) with which we increasingly deal through international aid programs such as the SIDA one for Sweden. However, it is relatively unknown how donor programs impact on the development and democratization of higher education in LICs. This includes the issues of students’ motivation to pursue doctoral research, which is what this project set out to explore. This is key concern since it is the small elites with such education who tend to inhabit leadership positions at all levels and especially in the public sector and the political domain in LICs.