The initial Rethé cohort during the program’s launch in Arusha, Tanzania in 2019. Photo: Elaine Nsoesie

Global Health

New Version of Rethé Project to Promote African Scientific Writing

With funding from a SPH Practice Innovation Award, the Rethé 2.0 initiative will provide scientific-writing tools and resources to students throughout Africa.

With a bit of well-placed writing guidance for emerging scholars, the Rethé 2.0 initiative hopes to expand upon its initial pilot project and further increase representation of Africans in scientific publishing.

The initiative is led by Elaine Nsoesie, an associate professor of global health who is also a Data Science Faculty Fellow and a founding faculty member of the Boston University Center for Computing and Data Sciences. Nsoesie and her international team provide scientific-writing tools and resources to students in Africa via partnerships with local African institutions that help host workshops.

“We’ll cover everything from how to write research papers to research ethics, and then also have sessions where people can ask questions about their papers and we can give them feedback,” Nsoesie said. The project was funded by a Practice Innovation Award from BUSPH that is intended to help further the School’s commitment to improving the conditions that promote health in local, national, and global communities.

The initial Rethé project launched in 2019 in Arusha, Tanzania with an in-person session at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology (NM-AIST), then shifted online for subsequent meetings during the pandemic. Nsoesie said the sessions created both excitement and interest in budding scholars, with “a lot of feedback from students who said, ‘We thought this was really complicated, but then after we went through the workshop, now I feel like I can do this and get my papers published.’”

In the first iteration, workshops were held in conjunction with institutions in Nigeria, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Kenya. Nsoesie said the overwhelmingly positive reception to the initial project contributed greatly to her decision to seek funding to help expand the reach and make it more accessible to new scholars across the continent.

For Rethé 2.0, Nsoesie says she hired a research intern who worked on creating slides to accompany video recordings, and to help create scripts to accompany the slides. In October, Nsoesie, who was born and raised in Cameroon, is scheduled to fly to Lagos, Nigeria to record video presentations in a studio. Lagos is the center of the thriving Nigerian film industry—known as “Nollywood”—which has become the second-largest producer of movies in the world after India.

With the new project, Nsoesie said, “We will have videos people can watch, and then we will have in-person workshops, but instead of teaching people how to write, we can just focus on actually doing the writing and getting papers out.” The structural difference between the first iteration and Rethé 2.0 is designed to enable Nsoesie and other instructors to spend less time going through the formative steps of writing research papers and concentrate on assisting students with the task of writing itself.

Initially, the target audience was graduate students, but Nsoesie said they found there were professors attending the sessions who found them very valuable additions to their own cursory knowledge of writing papers.

By streamlining the process with the early video instruction component, Nsoesie says the in-person sessions can concentrate on the details of creation, revision, and submission. “We can make sure that what they’re writing is in the correct format and that they’re ready to get it to a journal.”

Past sessions on Zoom were held in partnership with three Nigerian institutions and drew as many as 200 scholars, many of whom participated in lively question-and-answer sessions that furthered their aspirations. Nsoesie said she was at a conference in Sweden in 2023 when someone walked up to her and introduced himself as a former Rethé student whose interest in research was sparked by one of her writing classes. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon, Nsoesie said.

“That’s what makes me really excited about this program,” Nsoesie said. “People actually learn from it, take knowledge with them, and use it.”

Vanessa Boland Edouard, assistant dean for faculty resources and the idea hub incubator, said of the award, “Practice Innovation Awards support a particularly important piece of the SPH mission – moving our science out of the academy to communities and policy makers. We are grateful to our donors for supporting Dr. Nsoesie’s work and the idea hub pilot program.”

Later this month, Nsoesie and the Rethé team will be recruiting for a fellowship (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that is targeted toward African women working specifically in women’s health issues.