PADA runs a program for post-doctoral individuals to support their career progression. This comprises seminars on supervision, teaching, and publishing; proposal writing workshops; and writing clinics where faculty are given encouragement, mentorship and space to work on publications.

PADA plans to run pre-doctoral courses to encourage and prepare prospective students to enrol in doctoral programs.  

Proposal Writing Workshops

The purpose of the proposal writing workshops is to equip UG faculty to attract external funds for research. The workshop has been held as plenary and breakout sessions. The workshop focuses mainly on the proposal development process including discussions of the elements of a proposal, constructing project budgets, and the proposal review process. Participants had the opportunity to interact with representatives from USAID and DFID, who are major global sponsors in research and development projects.

Knowledge & Skills Enhancement Training Workshop

The Knowledge & Skill Enhancement Training Workshops were instituted by the School of Graduate Studies to compliment trainings run by individual departments and faculty in the area of research methodology, data analysis and thesis writings.

A total of 297 graduate students, both from the Sciences and Humanities, have benefitted from the workshops. The project is tracking the performance of past students in terms of thesis quality and submission time in comparison with non-participants, as a means to evaluate the impact of the workshop.

Institutionalizing Mentoring at UG

Mentoring as an institutionalized activity at the University of Ghana is a much-needed tool for improving graduate students' important relationships with their research supervisors and faculty members. The Carnegie "Next Generation of Academics in Africa" Project initiated this process by inviting heads of faculties, departments and senior administrators of the University to a meeting to discuss this need and process of a mentoring programs. Issues discussed were the roles of the mentor and the mentee, qualifications for a mentor, the structure and period of the mentoring relationship, the expected outcome, benefits and how the mentoring relationships would be assessed.

Graduate Supervision Workshops

With support from the Carnegie "Next Generation for Academics in Africa" Project, the Office of Research, Innovation and Development (ORID) organized its first Graduate Supervision Workshop, the purpose of which was to help faculty members define their roles and responsibilities as supervisors.

Other topics that were discussed during the workshop were the role of the as graduate students, the issue of graduate committees as a gap that needed to be tackled in some departments.