Beyond Fellowships: How Long-Term Investment Builds Scientific Communities

In international development, support for women in science is often discussed in terms of opportunities: scholarships, grants, training programmes, mobility schemes, mentoring initiatives. These interventions are essential. But one important dimension is frequently overlooked: what happens after the programme ends?

Over time, one of the most striking lessons I have observed through the work of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) is that long-term programmes do far more than support individuals. They can generate communities, institutional structures, and new forms of governance - sometimes in ways their designers never anticipated.

Twenty-Five Years of the PhD Fellowship Programme

The OWSD PhD Fellowship programme ran for twenty-five years. In the landscape of international cooperation, this is an extraordinary timeframe. Most programmes are designed in three- or five-year cycles. Few survive long enough to see their alumni become leaders in their fields, let alone to watch those alumni build new institutions around themselves.

The programme ended a few years ago, just as I was joining OWSD. I won't pretend that was easy to witness. There is something genuinely painful about seeing a flagship initiative conclude - the more so when you arrive precisely at the moment of closure and begin to piece together retrospectively what it meant. Today, as the last cohorts of fellows are completing their doctoral studies, the picture becomes clearer. A dropout rate of only around 10% - despite the structural barriers, funding pressures, and difficult personal circumstances that many fellows navigated - is, by any measure, a remarkable outcome. This was not a programme that produced passive beneficiaries. It produced committed, deeply invested scientists who stayed.

But the full significance of the fellowship only becomes visible when you stop counting degrees and start looking at what grew around them.

From Fellows to Networks to Structures

Women scientists who connected to OWSD as PhD fellows often remained linked to the organization - and to each other - long after their studies ended. At the same time, host institutes that had welcomed OWSD fellows began, in many cases, to gather other women scientists locally. Something that started as a hosting arrangement evolved into a space of exchange and collaboration that extended well beyond the original fellowship framework.

What emerged gradually was not simply an alumnae network, but a growing ecosystem.

In many countries, these informal connections eventually crystallized into OWSD National Chapters: formalized structures led by women scientists themselves, rooted in local scientific communities while remaining connected to a global network. The retention was not manufactured. It was the natural consequence of having invested in people over time - and of those people finding, in each other, something worth continuing to build.

The Backbone of the Organization

Today, the National Chapters are the true backbone of OWSD. They organize mentoring activities, scientific conferences, outreach programmes for girls, policy dialogues, training initiatives, and collaborations with universities and institutions. They work under constraints that would exhaust many organizations: unstable funding cycles, limited operational capacity, shifting institutional priorities. And they continue anyway.

What sustains them, I think, is not primarily funding. It is ownership. Belonging. A shared sense of purpose that was seeded, often unknowingly, twenty-five years ago.

Crucially, National Chapters are no longer only implementing activities. They are increasingly becoming actors in governance. Their voices shape strategic discussions. Their experience informs organizational direction. The evolution from beneficiary to co-author is one of the most significant — and least celebrated — outcomes of the fellowship programme's long arc.

A Rupture That Became an Opening

The end of the PhD Fellowship programme was not only a loss. It also created the conditions for a genuine rethinking. Without the defining weight of one flagship programme, OWSD was free - and in some ways compelled - to ask harder questions about its role and its value proposition.

What has emerged is something more distributed, more collaborative, and arguably more durable. The organization has progressively strengthened its function as an aggregator, a connector, an advisory actor, and a platform, increasingly implementing initiatives through and alongside its National Chapters, rather than from the centre outward. The chapters are not delivery mechanisms. They are partners.

This shift is becoming more concrete with each passing year, as new opportunities emerge that are structured around this model of shared ownership and distributed implementation.

GenSIS and the GIS Committees

One important expression of this evolution has been the GenSIS programme - Gender in Science, Innovation, Technology and Engineering Systems - developed in collaboration with UNESCO's Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) Unit, within the UNESCO Call to Action to Close the Gender Gap in Science. GenSIS exemplifies what OWSD is becoming: not a funder of individual careers, but a connector of scientific communities, policymakers, and institutions around questions of structural gender equality in science and innovation systems.

The establishment of Gender in Science (GIS) Committees in several national contexts reflects the same logic. These are not one-off events or isolated projects. They are mechanisms designed to connect research, policy, institutions, and advocacy over time: precisely the kind of durable infrastructure that the fellowship programme demonstrated, through twenty-five years of evidence, actually works.

A Personal Reflection

I joined OWSD three and a half years ago. By then, the organization already had over fifty active National Chapters. Today, we are approaching the establishment of the sixtieth.

For approximately the last two and a half years, I have had the privilege of serving as the Secretariat's focal point for many of these chapters: their direct point of contact for everything from operational support to governance questions to the coordination of the 2025 General Assembly, which brought together representatives from across our global network.

It has been a front-row seat to something extraordinary. Despite the constraints (the funding uncertainties, the administrative pressures, the sheer volume of work that often falls to small and overstretched teams) what these chapters produce is remarkable. The energy, the initiative, the commitment to doing more than anyone has formally asked of them.

And it has been a privilege, too, to observe the organization itself evolving, moving steadily from direct programme implementation toward a more advisory, connective role, building systems that can sustain women in science collectively, rather than one fellowship at a time.

Sometimes, the most important outcomes of a programme are not visible in its original design. They emerge slowly, through relationships, trust, continuity, and the gradual formation of structures that eventually become strong enough to sustain themselves -and others - in return.

The PhD Fellowship programme ended. What it built is still growing.