Building Capacity via International Field Campaigns in Africa: A Necessary Practice for Inclusion

The environment of Africa is often considered a unique laboratory to undertake international field campaigns, leading to fundamental insights into the inner workings of the Earth System. However, gross inequities exist among African Scientists/Institutions and their counterparts in the United States and Europe. Field campaigns often extract valuable data that can enrich the discipline and careers of participating scientists but leave little for participating African Institutions to thrive from these opportunities. To change the existing narrative of data extraction, new field campaigns can be designed to build local capacity and provide African institutions with some infrastructure to benefit from field campaigns while building long-lasting, sustainable partnerships. This approach can also benefit underrepresented students and scientists in the United States, who, through field campaign participation, can develop long-term collaborations with scientists/institutions in Africa. In this presentation, I describe some examples of long-term collaborations from field measurements over the last 20 years.