- BACKGROUND
Each year, AFF works with a transdisciplinary team averaging 40 African experts and 20 postgraduate students to produce a considerable amount of outputs, at various levels and in various fields, including books, journal articles, monographs, reports, policy briefs, fact sheets, among others. And these are accessed by very many people. For example, the total number of information materials freely available on the AFF website by December 31, 2021 was 229. They include journal articles (56), policy briefs (20), factsheets (8), reports (41), publications under AFF Working Paper Series (58), training modules (2), newsletters (17), edited proceedings of meetings (1), books (5), compendium (9), and corporate documents (12). In 2021 there were 18,505 pdfs downloaded from the website, with 3,486,334 pages opened by 299,085 visitors from 152 countries who visited the website 729,596 times.
To ensure that the knowledge products remain continuously of high-quality standard and meets the needs of stakeholders at various levels, there is need to strengthen capacity of AFF stakeholders on technical and scientific writing skills. Issues of such capacity building are in line with the AFF programmatic area number 6 and 7 (viz. (vi)) capacity building and skills development and (vii) information management and impact assessment)and contribute directly to the objectives of the SDC and Sida funded projects, as well as to the ‘purpose’ of AFF. In this way, such activities combine to strengthen the institutional capacity of AFF.
In this respect, AFF is collaborating with the College of Forestry, Wildlife and Tourism at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania to organize a training workshop on “Technical writing and publishing scientific papers” to be held on 20 – 24 June 2022, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. AFF intends to reach many of its stakeholders in future with such training.
2. PURPOSE OF THE WORKSHOP
The overall objective of the training workshop is to strengthen the capacity of African forestry stakeholders, on (a) technical writing and (b) publishing scientifically sound knowledge products. The training will provide participants with the skills, knowledge and confidence to publish in peer reviewed journals and write good technical documents. This is expected to contribute to enhancing the impact of their research outputs on forestry and related issues.
More specifically, the training targets to :
- Enable participants to understand the fundamentals of technical writing
- Help participants to identify all the steps in the writing process
- Understand the use of technical writing tools to improve publications
- Develop the capacity of participants in writing manuscripts for publication in high quality peer reviewed journals
- Familiarize participants with the publication process and interaction with journal editorial and reviewing teams
- Equip participants to revise and edit publications effectively
- Familiarize participants with ethics of science
The training will be structured as a write-shop, that includes theory, practice and tips on technical and scientific writing and their application to participants’ circumstances. Selected participants will be required to bring a draft knowledge product they have developed to be used as case study during the training. The detailed content of the training will be shared with selected participants.
3. WORKSHOP EXPECTATIONS
At the end of the training, the participants will be able to:
- Describe what makes an effective, well-organized, professional scientific paper;
- understand the research cycle and develop the culture of scientific writing in order to promote their research outcomes through well-structured scientific articles published in reputable peer reviewed journals or as technical documents;
- Appreciate the protocols and ethics of scientific publication
- Understand editorial decision-making and the peer-review process
4. WORKSHOP APPROACH AND DURATION
The workshop will be conducted physically in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, over a duration of 5 days from the 20 to the 24 June 2022.
5. PARTICIPANTS
The event is expected to convene about 30 participants, mainly earlier carrier forestry professionals, consultants and postgraduates from Anglophone and Lusophone countries.
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