The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) hosted the “Mentoring the Mentors” meeting in Nairobi, Kenya on February 17 and 18, 2025. The two-day workshop is based on CFAR’s successful 10+-year Mentoring the Mentors workshops held annually at the UCSF-Bay Area CFAR. The Kenya workshop featured a keynote from Dr. Moses Kamya from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and included talks from UCSF-based and Kenya-based faculty in an intensive and interactive meeting designed to provide faculty in HIV research with the tools for more effective mentoring in the context of African-based universities and research centers. The workshop included interactive sessions on the mentor-mentee relationship, structuring the mentoring relationship, and barriers related to being an early career investigator. It featured didactic and interactive sessions on practical tips for mentoring, including sessions on distance mentoring, time management, leadership styles, manuscript writing, grant writing, individual development plans, funding strategies, forming teams, etc. We spent time discussing how to form mentorship programs at Africa-based universities and getting credited for mentoring at the university level.
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The workshop included 54 participants from 10 African countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, and Ghana. The overall feedback from the participants was that this was an extremely useful and timely workshop and they left feeling energized about implementing more formal and structured mentoring programs at their own institutions.