The Training Centre in Communication(TCC Africa), is the first African-based training centre to teach effective communication skills to scientists. TCC Africa is an award winning Trust, established as a non-profit entity in 2006 and is registered in Kenya. TCC Africa provides capacity support in improving researchers output and visibility through training in scholarly and science communication.
In todays’ competitive academic environment scientists need to know how to effectively communicate with their peers; beginning with coming up with a research idea, writing the proposal to communicating it. Beyond this ,researchers and higher education stakeholders need to understand the academic landscape and the research lifecycle process and how it can make them competitive.
We support published researchers , on how to translate their published work for various audiences. This is done through interactive workshops, where we bring science media partners, and science communication specialists and guide scientists how they can effectively communicate with different publics.
TCC Africa held its first course in October 2006 at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda and in late 2007, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Nairobi, School of Biological Sciences, and has its headquarters on the Chiromo Campus, Nairobi, Kenya.
TCC Africa’s mission is to contribute to the increase in profile, locally, and internationally, of African science, and its impact on the life of Africans, by improving skills in technical communication in all forms, at academia and other relevant forums, in Africa.
To Train. Support. Empower. researchers through capacity in improving their research output and visibility.
SDG 4- Quality Education
Democratization of Higher Education
One of the biggest challenges researchers in the Global South face is obtaining good quality education. Focusing on higher education, one of the problems universities and research institutes face is lack of capacity to produce good quality research outputs and access to high impact data to conduct research. It is in line with this, that one of our objectives is build research capacity on the accessibility and effective use of Open Access Data to improve research discovery and visibility . This in turn gives researchers in the Global South a level playing field and a competitive edge to produce quality research ,create collaborations and increase their funding pool.
SDG 17 – Partnership for the Goals
For TCC Africa to be relevant and sustainable, we believe in creating partnerships for effective research capacity to be built.
TCC Africa’s Founding Director, Prof.Gabor Lövei is based at Aarhus University (Denmark), Department of Integrated Pest Management, where he does research in ecology, and teaches ecology and scientific communication and regularly teaches on TCC courses.
TCC Africa’s Co-Founding Non Executive Director is Ms Joy Owango.
TCC Africa’s operations is co-ordinated by TCC Programme Manager & Head of Universities Relations Mr Harrison Weda.
TCC Africa’s is supported by an Advisory Committee and Board of Trustees, composed of respected academics in East Africa and Europe. The role of the Advisory Committee is to support, guide and periodically evaluate the activity of the Centre.
The aim of TCC Africa is to train a group of local Trainers, who will take an increasingly active role in the training program. Currently TCC has local trainers in Sub Sahara Africa who have taken up the training programme and continuous training of trainers takes place to make TCC self sustainable.
Since TCC Africa started its activity, over thirteen thousand, one hundred and twelvee (13,112) participants from over forty (40) different countries and over eighty (80) institutions have taken part in the long and short courses offered.
