Background

The Academic Research Centre (ARC) arises from observations made by the Founders, Professor Nherera and Dr Chakarisa over a period of time, regarding the growing need to enhance academic research capacity across all disciplines in Zimbabwe, the whole Southern Africa Development Community Region and indeed internationally. Within Sub-Saharan Africa, it is widely acknowledged that with the exception of South Africa, research output is relatively low, as evident from the limited number of publications by scholars in comparison to output from other global regions. Yet, research has become necessary in the increasingly competitive knowledge based global economy in which policies and development strategies need to be backed by empirical and other research evidence. The need to develop high level local research capacity has become more and more apparent in both the public and private sectors. Post-graduate qualifications have become the normal requirement in middle to senior level work situations which are growing in complexity and competitiveness. In Zimbabwe for instance, all academic staff in universities are required to hold or at least to be well on their way towards acquiring a minimum of Doctoral qualifications by 2020. Given the current low proportion of holders of such qualifications in almost all universities in the country, hundreds of lecturers have embarked on their Doctoral studies through local institutions or foreign ones. The current capacity of local universities to enroll Doctoral candidates is far lower than the demand exerted by this call for higher qualifications. Consequently, many aspiring candidates fail to enroll while a lot of those enrolled either locally or with foreign institutions do not seem to get adequate research training and supervisory support, resulting in many of them taking unnecessarily long to complete their studies. The ARC therefore endeavours to contribute towards the enhancement of research capacity at all levels and get involved in contributing towards research based policies and strategies in Zimbabwe, the SADC Region, Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. It aims to achieve this through either undertaking research projects in response to calls for proposals or by capacitating potential researchers, including the development of a bigger pool of Doctoral qualification holders.

Objectives

• Provide postgraduate research support
• Facilitate application for registration and supervision
• Facilitate applications for scholarships and research grants
• Undertake research
• Facilitate Ethics approval
• Manage researches projects
• Run research conferences, research training workshops and seminars
• Establish a postgraduate research drop-in centre
• Publish and disseminate research output
• Undertake and facilitate collaborative research
• Facilitation of foreign researchers applications to carry out local researches
• Run public lectures
• Training in research-based policy formulation and analysis
• Publish policy briefs

Other objects of general public utility:

• The Academic Research Centre (ARC) publishes an open access interdisciplinary research journal known as the Journal of Interdisciplinary Academic Research (JIAR) to promote scholarship across all disciplines and promote academic and professional collaboration to provide wholesome research based solutions for public utility.
• Research training provided by ARC is intended to enhance scholarship across disciplines and provide research based policy briefs that demystify research output for policy-makers, development partners and targeted beneficiaries.
• To undertake any other activity incidental to the above activities but which are not inconsistent with the above objects.