Academic and institutional support for postgraduate students in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review
Résumé
Postgraduate students play a crucial role in higher education, due to their strategic role in strengthening institutional research capacity, elevating academic prestige, and generating significant financial returns. Regrettably, despite the widely acknowledged critical importance of postgraduate programs, the services and support towards the postgraduate students’ dynamics remain insufficient. While these programs are foundational and instrumental for fostering leadership and expertise, the current support structures for postgraduate students are often inadequately tailored. Thus, this study identified systemic gaps in support for postgraduate students in sub-Saharan African higher education institutions. The Arksey and O'Malley framework, as enhanced by Levac et al. was employed to guide this study. A comprehensive search across five electronic databases: Scopus, ERIC, Education sources, Web of Science, CINHAL Complete, and a manual search from Google Scholar was conducted. These five databases were chosen because they provide multidisciplinary optimal coverage of studies, education-specific research, and grey literature. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist was employed for consistency and formality. Out of 2,349 articles retrieved during the title screening process. Fifteen articles were finally included in this review. Most of the studies were from South Africa ( n = 7, 46.6%), followed by Ethiopia ( n = 3, 20.3%). 93.3% of these studies were published between 2021 and 2025 ( n = 14), and 53.3% ( n = 8) of the studies employed a qualitative approach. Two themes emanated: (1) Experiences of postgraduate students on academic support, and (2) institutional and social support. The themes have seven categories. The experiences of many of the postgraduate students indicated limited institutional and social support, which includes communication and supervisory methods. Communication and supervision methods are vital to the students. Addressing communication and supervision is essential to improve postgraduate students’ experiences in HEIs. Thus, enhancing postgraduate students’ success.
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