Kevin Marsh: Africa in partnership with Oxford

I'm Kevin Marsh; throughout my professional life, I've been a malaria researcher, but nowadays my work focuses on what we do in AfOx, which is the Africa Oxford Initiative. This is a cross-university platform in Oxford that we set up, basically to support equitable collaboration between researchers across Africa and colleagues in Oxford. And we work in a number of areas, but the main ones are supporting equitable partnerships in education, in research and in innovation.

For an example of a recent achievement, it's always quite difficult because you tend to think of the big ones, and some of the small achievements are also really important. But if you want one achievement for AfOx recently, I would say it would have to be our partnership with the Mastercard Foundation who've invested heavily in what we're doing, and it's enabled us to massively increase the number of graduate studentships for African students that we support in Oxford. 

One of the issues in our line of work, because we're particularly involved in supporting equitable collaborations, is the definition of equitable. Everybody says they work equitably, but when you begin to unpick that, it's not always so obvious what equitable collaboration really requires. So that's a fairly major issue in our line of work. And of course, the most recent issues are the changes in geopolitics, particularly the consequent reduction in funding from the United States, which has shifted everything in the kind of things we and others do.

If I had to sum up how our work makes difference for researchers in Africa, I would say it's through networking and connectivity, because whether our work is in research, education or innovation, the key element is bringing people together, and that can't be underestimated as a driver of success. I mean success, individual success, but also the success of projects and enterprises really based on collaboration and networking. And that's the one thing that I think we are particularly good at doing for African colleagues across the continent.

I think the line of work that we do in AfOx matters for a number of reasons at different levels. At the individual level, as we've said, it brings networking opportunities, collaborations. At the level of African futures, Africa has an agreed agenda driven by the African Union signed up to by all members states, a vision of the continent in 50 years’ time, and that's based on knowledge-based economies, and so the sort of support of research in academia is absolutely central to the development of an African agenda.

I think our work also matters to Oxford a lot, but again at different levels. At the level of individual researchers and departments I think it enriches enormously to have an injection of African colleagues into different departments in Oxford, but at the level of the institution overall it's also very important because I think Africa will determine the future of the world in ways many people don't understand, and I think any global university or any institution that claims to be global absolutely has to have a strategy for Africa. So, in that sense I think it's a real strategic necessity for the university.

This interview was recorded in September 2025.