Join us for an exciting session at the King’s Africa week as the AMARI team discuss one of its flagship training courses, the Academic Competencies Enhancement Series (ACES).

The session will cover:

• Why the ACES course, how it came about.
• Designing and running the ACES programme.
• Experiences of delivering ACES to both research and clinical trainees.
• Fellows’ testimonials on how ACES helped them in their careers.
• Next steps for ACES for AMARI-II.

Capacity building is essential in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to address the gap in skills to conduct and implement research. Capacity Building must not only include scientific and technical knowledge, but also broader competencies, such as writing, disseminating research and achieving work–life balance. These skills are thought to promote long-term career success for researchers in high-income countries (HICs) but the availability of such training is limited in LMICs. Through consultation between HIC and LMIC partners, an innovative series of 10 workshops under the banner Academic Competencies Enhancement Series (ACES) was designed covering themes of self-development, engagement and writing skills. ACES formed core training of the African Mental Health Research Initiative (AMARI), a multi-national LMIC-led consortium to recruit, train, support and network early-career mental health researchers from four sub-Saharan African countries. 24 PhD and 5 post-doc AMARI fellows were mentored in ACES.