PASET Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund for STEM PhDs

What PASET RSIF funds

The Partnership for skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology (PASET) is an African-government-led initiative to close the region's skills gap in technical fields. Its flagship program, the Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund (RSIF), funds PhD candidates, and a smaller number of Masters candidates, at African host universities in five priority areas: ICT including big data and artificial intelligence, food security and agribusiness, minerals, mining and materials engineering, energy including renewables, and climate change.

RSIF is funded by a mix of African governments, the European Commission, the World Bank and the Government of Korea , and is managed day to day by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Nairobi, which acts as the RSIF Regional Coordinating Unit.

The sandwich placement model

What sets RSIF apart from a standard PhD scholarship is the mandatory placement abroad. A RSIF PhD runs 3 to 4 years and includes a 6 to 24 month sandwich stay at an international partner university, research institute or private company. You complete the bulk of your coursework and research at your African host university, then spend part of your program abroad building technical skills and connections you bring back to your research.

This structure exists so RSIF graduates end up trained to international research standards while your primary research stays grounded in an African context and mostly supervised by African academics, rather than a full-length migration to a foreign university.

What the scholarship covers

RSIF PhD awards cover university tuition and related fees, a stipend for living costs, travel, medical insurance and research costs. Because the program is industry-linked, some projects also connect you with a private-sector partner relevant to your thematic area, giving your dissertation research a direct link to a potential employer or commercial application.

Host universities

RSIF operates through a network of fifteen African host universities spread across Sub-Saharan Africa. Each host university specializes in a subset of the five priority thematic areas, so your choice of host depends on which university has active research capacity in your specific field, not only your home country.

Kenyatta University in Kenya is one of the RSIF host universities that regularly runs its own call for PhD scholarship applications alongside the central RSIF portal, a pattern worth checking for other host universities in the network too.

How to apply

RSIF issues periodic calls for PhD applications through its central applications portal, with each call listing which host universities and thematic areas have open slots that cycle. You choose a host university and research theme as part of your application, so review the current call carefully to confirm your intended field and university combination is open before you prepare a full application.