Baloo, Bagheera and Mowgli: Navigating the research “jungle” in a multi-country mentorship programme

In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Mowgli is chased out of the jungle by Sher Khan – the tiger who hates all people. Guided by two most unlikely partners, Baloo (a gregarious and lackadaisical bear) and Bagheera (a strict, overly protective panther), Mowgli has to navigate their various personalities and approaches as he simultaneously traverses the exciting but dangerous jungle. While Baloo and Bagheera are both driven by ensuring Mowgli’s survival and safety, their roles and approaches differ greatly, leaving Mowgli at times empowered and at other times completely confused.
 

This unlikely partnership reminds me of our mentorship program within the Collaboration for Evidence-Based Healthcare and Public Health in Africa (CEBHA+). The CEBHA+ consortium is funded by German BMBF and comprises nine partners (seven African and two German) as per the graphic below:

 
All partners (senior researchers, junior researchers and students) were encouraged to seek mentoring in areas they sought to improve their skills in, with a focus on noncommunicable disease research, practice and policy. These areas ranged from technical skills in biostatistics and evidence synthesis to relational skills, such as stakeholder engagement and integrated knowledge translation. For some mentees, the mentorship needs were simply about survival (e.g., how to survive during graduate training or the trials and tribulations of doctoral training), in addition to assistance with writing and manuscript publication. Mentors and mentees had to sign formal agreements that laid out the expectations of both roles, objectives of the mentoring and accountability mechanisms. Five years into the program, there have been 20 mentor and mentee matches from across the partners.
 

The Jungle Book analogy, for me, is the one that concerns postgraduate students within the CEBHA+ consortium. Of the 20 matches, 17 were requested by masters and PhD students who had their own university academic supervisors for their research. They sought mentorship from a CEBHA+ colleague for support with technical capacity gaps in their academic journeys. Here comes the Baloo and Bagheera scenario. While I don’t seek to attribute who is Baloo and who is Bagheera in this situation, I do want to reflect on the challenges of having two highly experienced but unrelated experts attempting to guide the same student, perhaps in very different ways.
 

Let me take the example of Violet,* a PhD student exploring perceptions of cardiovascular disease risk in rural communities of Tanzania. Her academic supervisor was very strong in quantitative methods, but her study had a clear qualitative aspect. Unfortunately, Violet’s university cancelled all qualitative research courses during her PhD due to challenges with online transitions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fearful of delaying her studies or not being able to complete them, Violet sought mentorship from a senior CEBHA+ colleague. The CEBHA+ mentor stepped in with advice and funding options on international courses in the interim. Other CEBHA+ colleagues offered her a role on an ongoing qualitative research project to provide experiential opportunities for training. This enabled Violet to complete her academic requirements in time to launch her own PhD research project. However, there was no communication between the academic supervisor and the mentor on these challenges, the solutions and the impact on Violet’s academic journey. Tensions emerged for Violet in terms of who to acknowledge and credit for her advancement, how to combine her quantitative findings with her qualitative data, who to offer authorship to for her papers and how to navigate the politics of her situation.
 

Similarly, Jonah* was planning a quantitative study with a rare, expected outcome. The cluster-level study design explored questions such as: should it be randomised? if not, what is the best way to design it so that the risk of bias due to confounding is minimised? Given that the primary outcome was expected to be quite a rare outcome, what analysis would allow for it to be analysed appropriately? What other outcomes could be collected to supplement the study? Supervisors and CEBHA+ mentors had different experiences with such studies and provided varied suggestions about how to proceed. Neither were in contact with each other, and their ideas were shared through Jonah. This left him in a conundrum when choosing which study design would be best suited to his challenging conditions.
 

It’s important to note that academic supervisors have been silent partners in the mentorship program, with their roles, at times, determined by another party altogether. While academic supervisors and mentors are not in a voluntary partnership with each other, their partnership is brokered unknowingly by the student.
 

Lessons learnt
The CEBHA+ experience has led me to reflect on some of the advantages and challenges of embedding a master’s/PhD mentorship program into a consortium such as CEBHA+. As described in this paper, Experiential learning and mentorship in global health leadership programs: capturing lessons from across the globe, such mentorship programs and partnerships are quite common. Across the six programs embedded within diverse consortia:

One common challenge was ensuring that program and mentoring expectations were clear and understood by both trainees and mentors. This challenge was often magnified through involvement of multiple institutions, countries and cultures, and flux of trainees and mentors across successive years.
 

However, unlike this Lancet article that highlights challenges between mentors in high-income countries and mentees in low- and middle-income countries, the CEBHA+ mentorship program was dominated by mentor-mentee matches from within the low- and middle-income countries’ partners. The recommendations, however, from the article are worth considering.
 

In any consortia that includes a mentorship program for postgraduate students focusing on research, the likelihood that these students will have to navigate the input from a Baloo and Bagheera is almost inevitable. Both the supervisor and mentor have similar goals to support and guide the student to navigate the ‘research jungle’. These unplanned but likely partnerships need more attention and consideration so as to magnify the advantages for students (access to a wider network of expertise and peers; ability to receive guidance on the same topic from multiple sources; access to CEBHA+ resources to fill academic training gaps etc.) and avoid the pitfalls for students (deciding whose advice carries more weight (the formal academic supervisor, or the informal CEBHA+ mentor)) as well as for mentors and supervisors.
 

Some key suggestions (also highlighted in a vlog for World Evidence Based Healthcare Day) could be for consortia such as CEBHA+ to:

• request academic supervisors to cosign/acknowledge the existence and objectives of the mentor/mentee agreements so that there is an alignment of purpose and goals between all parties as the student advances in their academic journey;
• institute governance processes that assist students, supervisors and mentors in navigating the mentorship program (including effective communication and dispute resolution) and perhaps distinguish the roles more clearly (e.g., supervisor for technical support, mentor for career support);
• engage in frequent reflexivity of mentors and mentees on the role they play and the impact on academic supervisors not within the consortium.

As the African Proverb states: ‘If you want to go faster, go alone; if you want to go farther, go together.’
 

Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank CEBHA+ colleagues and the mentorship program as inspiration for this blog. I am grateful to Jacob Burns and Prof. Taryn Young for their contributions and suggestions. Views and opinions are my own.
 

*name, topic and country intentionally changed to retain anonymity

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this World EBHC Day Blog, as well as any errors or omissions, are the sole responsibility of the author and do not represent the views of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee, Official Partners or Sponsors; nor does it imply endorsement by the aforementioned parties.