Support African scholar in financial distress

My name is Adeyemi Adetula, a PhD student in the Co-Regulation Lab (CO-RE Lab) at Université Grenoble Alpes from Lagos, Nigeria.

 

In February 2020, just one month before the Covid-19 pandemic swept Europe leaving lockdowns and social distancing in its wake, I travelled to Grenoble, France to chase my dream of building a truly African psychological science. I arrived with the understanding that I was fully funded by Nigeria’s Tertiary Education Trust Fund (Tetfund).

 

Unfortunately, financial instability caused by the pandemic, combined with a long series of broken promises by the Tetfund, have left me with no support over the past year and a half from the grant that I was awarded. Instead, I have scraped by on my own funds and a few small sources of flexible money that my supervisors have cobbled together.

 

I am now asking you, my friends, colleagues, and the broader scientific community, for your help. I need €22,000, or €1,000 for each of the 22 months remaining in my PhD, to keep my dreams alive.

 

Below I provide more background on who I am, my financial situation, what I’ve accomplished in my PhD so far, and how you can help.

 

Who I am

 

Every morning I wake up thinking about work. And now, far away from home, away from family and friends, and away from the pounded yam with Egusi soup and bushmeat that I love, my dream of earning a PhD keeps me going every day, even late into the cold nights, while listening to Yoruba rhythm and beat.

 

My passion for psychology started at a tender age as I carefully observed my dad and my uncle, who earn their living working as psychologists. It still beats my imagination how my uncle disarmed an angry man brandishing an iron rod with just a question "Can I see the rod?" leaving the man, and myself, astounded. To satisfy my curiosity about how and what psychologists do, I secretly read psychology texts from my dad's bookshelf. It was, therefore, a no-brainer to choose psychology when I had other options to study economics, geography, and food science technology even though psychology was not popular among young Nigerians seeking admission into the university. Thankfully my passion for psychology translated into excellence as I graduated top of the class in my undergraduate and master's.

 

I want to inspire other Africans to take up psychology, just as my dad and uncle inspired me. So I joined the Department of Psychology, Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike, Nigeria, where I taught psychology for 6 years. Yet I felt that this training was insufficient for gaining the research skills I’d need to mentor the next generation of African psychologists. Hence I embarked on a three-year journey to earn the scholarship necessary to complete a PhD in Psychology at a foreign university. Finally, I got an offer from Université Grenoble Alpes to work with Dr. Hans IJzerman, Dr. Dana Basnight-Brown, and Dr. Patrick Forscher. However, at that time, my grant application was in progress. So my home university asked that I spend my own money in the first year in place of the monthly salary I should have received from Nigeria’s Tetfund. The university promised that, when the grant was eventually disbursed, I will get the refund and the remaining fund to finance my thesis. I was happy to do that, so I took a loan from a cooperative society, hoping that the grant would be awarded before 2020.

 

But the grant money never came.

 

My financial situation

 

When I left Lagos, I had paid 2.6 million Naira ($6,200 USD or €5,700) into the fund plus other expenses such as flight tickets, visa processing fees, and loan interest. In total, I invested 4 million Naira ($9,600 USD or €8,700) of my own money before leaving Nigeria.

 

When the pandemic hit, the Nigerian Naira lost value against the Euro, and Tetfund did not have the money to support me. Ten months into my arrival at Grenoble, I stopped receiving the monthly payment. The money I deposited was exhausted, and I had not received any money from Tetfund as promised. This situation persisted despite repeated emails from me, my primary supervisor Dr. Hans IJzerman, my university, and the French government body that manages international students, Campus France. In addition to needing to pay my own expenses, I, an early career Nigerian scholar who wants to support and give back to my fellow Africans, have lost 4 million Naira to a scholarship scheme that promises to support the development of precisely the promising Nigerian scholars like me.

 

I have done everything I can to lower my living costs over the past year and a half. To cut my daily costs, I have skipped lunch, slept in the cold because running the room heater is too expensive, and l live on a low budget to make sure I can survive. I have even borrowed more money to cover living expenses and have earned the little money my situation, a non-French-speaker in a French-speaking nation pursuing a labor-intensive degree, allows. I hope my colleagues understand why I have sometimes been reluctant to go out with them – limiting my time out is another way to lower my cost of living.

 

What I’m doing in my PhD

 

Despite my difficult financial situation, I have been very productive in the first two years of my PhD. My work is focused on solving a thorny problem in psychology: the fact that less than 1 percent of research in top psychology journals is led by African scientists and studies African research samples. I want to change this by building up psychological research in Africa.

 

My CV and Google Scholar page attest to my accomplishments in pursuit of my goal:

 

I led the translation and implementation into the Yoruba language of the COVID-Rapid project, a multi-site project to investigate psychological questions related to COVID-19 that recruited more than 47,000 participants across 44 languages in 110 countries and a team of 467 collaborators

 

I contributed to a three-part series on the need to globalise psychological science hosted on the website of one of the foremost scientific societies for psychology, the Association for Psychological Science

 

I led the writing of a working paper that examines how the ongoing “credibility revolution” to increase the quality of research methods in psychology can synergize with efforts to develop the African continent

 

I gave a keynote address on the need for psychological science to include more African scientists at one of the most important scientific societies for my subfield, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science

 

I received a revise-and-resubmit at a major psychology journal (Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science) for the protocol of a mutli-site project I’m leading with 35 African collaborators to develop research capacity in Africa and examine the moral reasoning of Africans

 

I was invited to submit a commentary about African psychology for Nature Reviews Psychology

I received a commendation award from The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, 2020 for a blog post “How open science can advance African psychology: Lessons from the inside”

 

If I am allowed to continue my PhD, I will finish revising the protocol for this last multi-site project, ensure that data collection is completed successfully, and complete a second multi-site project focused on developing and validating psychological findings that are discovered in Africa, rather than the United States and Europe.

 

These efforts will allow me to realize my dream: to seize a place for African scientists in a field that researchers in the US and Europe overwhelmingly dominate. More importantly, 91 collaborators from 15 African countries have invested their resources in the multisite project, and I currently mentor a good number of them. Failure of this project would be a shame and setback in the movement to support the next generation of African researchers.

 

How you can help me attain my dream

 

Due to my efforts to minimise my living expenses, I currently need around €22,000 (or €1000 per month for 22 months) to keep myself in my PhD program.

 

This is where you come in. I am not permitted to work on my French visa. My supervisors and I have nearly exhausted my grant-based opportunities. I am therefore kindly asking for your generous support to help me attain my dreams.

 

You can either give a one-time donation on this GoFundMe page – or, if you wish to make a monthly donation, you can support me on my Patreon.

 

Your donation will not go to waste. I firmly believe that I am working on one of the most important problems in psychological science – and on a way to develop African science and unlock the continent’s outstanding scientific potential.

 

Thank you for your generous support. May God bless you!