Johannesburg — RESEARCH into improving health in Africa will benefit from a £3,2m grant from the Wellcome Trust, a UK charity, to the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (Carta), a joint venture of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) School of Public Health and the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) in Nairobi.

Africa carries a disproportionate illness burden and is the focus of many research questions, yet research output in public health remains at 0,3% of the world's total research output, said Carta deputy director Prof Sharon Fonn, a lecturer at the Wits School of Public Health.

The project, which aims to boost the number of doctorates in public and population health research, was launched at Wits yesterday .

Carta involves 10 African universities, four African research institutes and several northern partners that plan to work together to produce high-level research skills for Africa.

The National Research Foundation has warned that SA's PhD output -- 27 for every 1-million of the population -- compares unfavourably with Brazil's 42, South Korea's 172, Australia's 240 and the UK's 259.

The original budget for the entire Carta programme, including funding 25 PhD candidates a year, was 18m, but Carta was speaking to other donors, Fonn said. The Wellcome Trust grant would kick-start the process.

The money would be used mainly to fund scholarships for PhD candidates at participating universities, with the rest used to run the Carta curriculum, to invite international experts, to teach the PhD candidates and to develop infrastructure at participating universities and research centres.

African research capacity was hampered by the enormous growth in undergraduate student numbers at universities, expanding from a continent-wide participation level of about 337000 in 1980 to about 4-million in 2004, Fonn said.

Meanwhile, the state budget share decreased from a continental average of 19% in the early 1980s to about 15% in the early 1990s, according to the World Bank. This meant government investment per capita had "drastically" decreased, Fonn said. Another problem was the "brain drain".

Meanwhile, the executive director of the APHRC, Dr Alex Ezeh, said a lot of Africa's research capacity- strengthening programmes and collaborative partnerships were largely driven by northern academic and research institutions.