Location: University of Kinshasa (The Democratic Republic of the Congo)

Research Transparency is gaining attention in the scientific community around the world, including the United States, European countries, and Anglophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa; yet the concept is quite a “new world” in Francophone Africa. In my efforts to advance the movement in Francophone Africa, I successfully delivered the first Research Transparency Workshop at the University of Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo). This project is intended to sustain previous efforts to set up “Research Transparency in the Social Sciences” as a culture in the next generation of social scientists in Francophone Africa.

I will offer a training workshop for 60 graduate students, research staff, and professors at the University of Kinshasa to promote best practices for reproducible research with concrete guidance about how to make materials understandable for publication. The activities to be addressed during the workshop will include (1) organizing file structure; (2) creating understandable variable labels and value codes, as well as connecting variables to survey instruments through consistent labels and codebook creation; (3) version control of code and data; and (4) creating and maintaining documentation files about the survey and data, as well as data cleaning steps.

This workshop is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation.