Writeshops: An effective tool to enable African academics to publish K. Vincent a,n , T. Cull a , E. Archer van Garderen b , A. Awiti c a Kulima Integrated Development Solutions, South Africa b CSIR, South Africa c Aga Khan University, Kenya Increased public awareness, and the concomitant growth in political commitment to mitigation and adaptation, has made the need for accurate and relevant communication of scientific information on climate change more pressing (Fischoff, 2011). Although much research takes place on the African continent, by African scholars or those based at African institutions, a limited amount of it finds its way into the peer-reviewed literature, which is the leading evidence base for policy and development practice, and is the dominant source of literature for major global assessments, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and IPCC Assessment Reports. In this paper we discuss some of the reasons for such a disproportionate representation, and present promising evidence for the utility of so-called writeshops as a platform for mentoring and supporting peer-reviewed publications by African scholars to improve the situation in the short term. Africa has fewer scientists per capita, approximately one scientist/engineer per 10,000 people, compared to 20–50 per 10,000 in the industrialized world (Pifer and Demissie, 2009). The shortage of academic staff, combined with the necessity for researchers to fund (or supplement funding available for) their studies, means that very few African academics have the privilege of dedicating themselves full time to their postgraduate research. Moreover, the focus of postgraduate education is on fulfiling the requirement of completion of the thesis. Hence the ancillary benefits of postgraduate training are often overlooked. This includes learning to navigate the process of publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. The limited opportunity to learn how to publish in the peer-reviewed literature as a postgraduate student persists as graduate students become early career post-doctoral fellows and lecturers. For the Ph.D. graduates who want to pursue their academic careers, the pressures on their time – to generate research ideas/concepts, attract grant funding, and to teach increasingly large classes of undergraduates – continue to inhibit opportunities for publishing. In a cursory straw poll of major journals in the field of climate change adaptation, African research is woefully lacking. According to the editorial office of Global Environmental Change, a leading international, interdisciplinary journal (with an impact factor of 6.868), of the 323 manuscripts accepted since 1 January Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envdev Environmental Development 2211-4645/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2012.08.002 n Correspondence to: Postnet Suite H79, Private Bag x9118, Pietermaritzburg, 3200 South Africa. Tel.: þ27 72 196 4525. E-mail address: katharine@kulima.com (K. Vincent). Environmental Development 5 (2013) 172–174