Tiered mentorship — pairing senior scholars, mid-career researchers and a small cohort of early-career fellows on the same project for an entire year — is, in our experience, the single highest-leverage change a Global-South research lab can make.

A few months ago I sat across the table from a brilliant Kenyan master’s graduate who had just spent two years trying to publish her first peer-reviewed paper. The work was good. The supervisor had been well-intentioned. But the mentorship had effectively consisted of a handful of meetings, a few rounds of email feedback, and a long, lonely struggle in between.

She is not unusual. Across much of the Global South, early-career researchers face the same pattern: a single advisor stretched across too many students, a journal landscape they have never been shown how to navigate, and almost no community of peers walking the same path at the same time.

It does not have to be that way. We are seeing the alternative, every week, in the CIR-Lab cohort.

What “collective intelligence” actually means

“Collective intelligence” is one of those phrases that sounds beautiful in a brochure and slippery in practice. In our lab it means something specific: structured, tiered collaboration in which knowledge, mentorship, authorship and decision-making are distributed across generations of scholars who work together for long enough to actually build trust.

Three words in that sentence do most of the heavy lifting. Tiered: not flat. Structured: not improvised. Long enough: not a one-semester rotation.

The bet behind the model is simple. No single scholar — however senior — can hold every skill a serious research project demands. And no early-career researcher — however bright — can pick up those skills alone. But a small, mixed group of people, working steadily across a year on real research questions, can almost always reach further than any of them could individually.

Why traditional (non-tiered) mentorship is breaking down

The classic doctoral-style model of one master and one apprentice was built for a world in which research questions were narrower and supervisors had fewer students. In contemporary African universities — and many others in the Global South — neither condition holds.

A typical senior scholar today juggles teaching loads, administrative duties, grant writing, external consultancy, and (if they are lucky) their own research, while supervising eight to fifteen graduate students at once. The math does not work. Even the most generous supervisor cannot give each student the sustained, weekly engagement that early-career research actually requires.

The result is what we see everywhere: theses that take years longer than they should, papers that never reach a journal, fellowships missed because applicants were not coached through the process, and quiet attrition from the academic pipeline at exactly the age when research talent should be flowering.

How tiered mentorship actually works

At CIR-Lab, every research project is run by what we call a vertical team. It typically looks like this:

• A senior investigator — usually a PhD-holding faculty member — who sets the research question, holds methodological oversight, and is ultimately accountable for the integrity of the work.
• A mid-career collaborator — often a postdoctoral researcher or experienced practitioner — who runs day-to-day coordination, mentors directly, and carries much of the analytical load.
• A small cohort of early-career fellows — typically graduate students or recent graduates — who execute fieldwork, contribute to analysis, and co-author outputs.
• Specialist consultants — for example our consultant statistician — who join when the project needs their expertise and stay long enough to teach the fellows what they are doing.

The structure looks unremarkable on paper. What makes it work is the duration. Each cohort engages for a full year. That timeframe is long enough to build genuine trust, to walk through every phase of a real study — design, ethics review, fieldwork, analysis, drafting, revision, submission — and to teach skills that no semester-long class can transmit.

What a year inside the cohort actually looks like

The first quarter is mostly listening. Fellows attend project meetings, read assigned literature, observe senior scholars at work, and start drafting their own contributions. By the second quarter they are in the field — collecting data, transcribing interviews, learning the unglamorous craft that no methods textbook can fully describe.

The third quarter is where the model earns its keep. Fellows analyse data alongside their mentors, learn how decisions actually get made in real research (rather than how textbooks pretend they do), and begin writing. By the fourth quarter they have at least one co-authored manuscript in progress, often a conference presentation, and a substantially clearer sense of who they are as researchers.

None of this is hypothetical. It is the rhythm we run, week by week, across multiple active projects — from the Africa Long Life Study to cross-cultural work on emotion regulation, body-image resilience and traumatic stress.

Why this matters beyond any single lab

The Global South does not have a talent problem. Anyone who has taught at an African university for a year knows this. What we have is an infrastructure problem — too few sustained, well-resourced spaces where young researchers can grow.

A tiered mentorship model is one practical answer. It is replicable. It does not require enormous grants. It does require something harder: a willingness, on the part of senior scholars, to slow down and walk with people who are earlier in the journey, and a willingness on the part of those early-career researchers to commit to long, patient learning rather than fast credentials.

Where this combination exists, the outputs speak for themselves. Cohorts produce co-authored publications, take leadership of follow-on grants, win fellowships, and — most importantly — develop the kind of research confidence that no individual mentorship can manufacture.

Who this model is for

If you are an early-career researcher, a graduate student, or a practitioner who has wanted to move into research but has felt unsupported, structures like ours exist precisely for you. You do not need to have everything figured out. You need to be willing to learn, to show up consistently, and to contribute to work that is bigger than your own.

If you are a senior scholar, a foundation, or an institution thinking about how to invest in African research talent, the tiered model is, in our experience, one of the highest-leverage investments available. Funding a year-long cohort costs a fraction of a single major grant — and changes careers.

An invitation

CIR-Lab’s first formal fellowship cohort is currently being recruited. You can read more about the lab’s approach on our overview page, meet the team, browse active projects, and express interest in joining a future cohort.

The premise behind everything we do is simple, and we will keep repeating it until it stops feeling radical: diverse minds, disciplines and generations, working together with patience and structure, produce better research than any of them ever could alone.

That is collective intelligence. And the Global South has been waiting a long time for the chance to lead it.

Want to be part of the next cohort? Apply or express interest, or contact the lab directly.

Luhya mourning rituals are not folkloric exotica. They are a sophisticated, communal psychology of grief — refined across generations — that handles bereavement, isolation and meaning-making in ways modern clinical practice is still catching up to.

The first burial I ever attended as a researcher — rather than as a relative — was in a small village in western Kenya. I had been invited by a family who had agreed to participate in a study on traditional Luhya mourning practices. I arrived expecting to observe a “site of grief”. What I actually witnessed was something closer to an open-air clinic: a slow, communal, deeply orchestrated psychological intervention being delivered by people without a single graduate degree among them.

Years later, I am still trying to put words to what I learned there.

Why Western grief models keep falling short

Most clinicians around the world have inherited a version of grief that is private, individual, and time-limited. The bereaved person processes their loss, ideally with the help of a therapist, and “moves on” within a defined window. Anything that exceeds that window risks a diagnosis — complicated grief, prolonged grief disorder, persistent depressive episode.

This model is not wrong; it has helped countless people. But it was built largely inside small nuclear families in low-density urban societies. Applied without adjustment to East African communities, it tends to do three things badly: it underestimates the duration appropriate to a serious loss, it overestimates the privacy of grief, and it almost entirely misses the role of ritual containment in helping the bereaved survive the year that follows the funeral.

The communities I work with were quietly solving those three problems long before psychology arrived to name them.

Four things Luhya mourning rituals do extraordinarily well

1. They make grief a public, communal event

In Luhya tradition — and this is true, with variation, across much of Sub-Saharan Africa — grief is not something the bereaved are expected to manage on their own. From the moment of death, kin networks activate. Neighbours arrive within hours. Cooking, child-care, communication, finances, even sleep arrangements are handled collectively. The bereaved is held, fed, watched and quietly absorbed into a community routine.

From a clinical standpoint, this is remarkable. The single largest predictor of a difficult bereavement, in study after study, is social isolation. The traditional response simply refuses to let isolation happen.

2. They use time generously

Mourning in Luhya practice is not measured in days. The most intense ritual phase often runs for several weeks. A period of mourning observance — including dress, behavioural restrictions and continued visiting — can extend for months, sometimes a full year. Major memorial events at the end of the first year formally close the most acute phase.

Compare that to the two-week emotional containment that many employers expect, or the six-session bereavement protocol some health systems fund. The Luhya time-scale acknowledges what neuroscience now confirms: integrating a major loss is the work of months, not days.

3. They contain emotion through structured ritual

Western therapeutic practice often emphasizes expression of emotion — talking it through, naming it, processing it. Luhya practice does that too, but it also offers something subtler: structured containers for emotion. There are specific times when wailing is expected, specific people to whom one speaks about the deceased, specific songs, specific physical postures.

The genius of these structures is that they give grief somewhere to go. The bereaved is never told to suppress, but neither are they left adrift in unstructured pain. The rituals act, in psychological terms, almost like a scaffold around an unstable emotion until the person can hold it themselves.

4. They actively reincorporate the bereaved into ordinary life

This is the part most clinicians miss. Traditional Luhya mourning has explicit ceremonies of return. After the formal mourning period, the widow or widower is symbolically reintroduced to community life — sometimes through a meal, a haircut, a change of dress, or a public blessing. The deceased is not forgotten, but the survivor is given clear permission, by the community itself, to resume living.

The absence of such reincorporation rituals in many modern settings is, I suspect, one of the reasons “stuck” grief has become so common. The grieving person is told to move on, but no one collectively tells them that they may.

What clinicians outside Africa can borrow

You do not need to be working in a Luhya village to learn from these practices. A few principles travel well.

• Mobilize the network early. Family, faith community, friends — the more presence in the first weeks, the better. Solitary grieving, even by introverts, predicts worse outcomes.
• Extend the timeline. Both for yourself and for clients, normalize the idea that the first year is the unit of analysis, not the first month.
• Build small rituals. Even non-religious ones. A weekly walk, a Sunday meal in the deceased’s honour, a memorial tree, a candle on the table. These are not sentimental — they are containers.
• Mark the transition back. Choose, deliberately, a moment that signals the resumption of full life. Tell people close to you so they witness it.

Why this matters for psychology as a field

Studies of indigenous mourning are not folkloric exotica. They are clinical research. At CIR-Lab we treat traditional Luhya mourning practices the same way we would treat any evidence-based intervention — documenting them carefully, identifying mechanisms, and asking how they can be honoured, supported, and where appropriate, integrated into formal mental-health care.

The cross-cultural death and dying programme we are part of has already produced findings on bereavement, palliative care and afterlife beliefs across communities in Africa, Europe, the Americas and South Asia. You can read more about that and other related work on our research projects page.

A note for anyone currently grieving

If you are reading this in the middle of a loss, I am sorry. The most important thing I can tell you, drawn from years of watching extraordinary communities do this work, is that you do not have to do it alone. There is no version of grief in any culture I know of where solitude is the right answer. Reach for the people who love you. Build a small ritual. Be patient with your timeline.

And know that what you are doing — sitting with the loss, returning to it, letting it slowly reshape you — is not pathology. It is, in the language of many African elders, simply the long work of love continuing after a person is gone.

Interested in CIR-Lab’s thanatology work? Explore our active projects, read our publications on Google Scholar, or collaborate with the lab.

Decolonizing psychology in Africa is one of the most misunderstood phrases in our field. It is not about rejecting science. It is about asking, honestly, what a discipline built largely outside the continent owes the communities it now serves — and what those communities can teach it in return.

I still remember the first time a clinical textbook felt like a stranger in my own home. I was a master’s student in counselling psychology, sitting in a Nairobi seminar room, reading a chapter on grief that opened with a case study set in a quiet New England suburb. The widow in the case had been given six weeks of bereavement leave. Six weeks. In the village where I had buried my own grandfather only a year earlier, the mourning had lasted six months, involved three communities, and was supervised by a council of elders whose authority no insurance company could ever underwrite.

That dissonance — between the psychology I was being trained to deliver and the psychology lived by the people I was supposed to serve — is the seed of everything I now write about.

Why decolonizing psychology is the right phrase, not the comfortable one

The word decolonization makes some readers uneasy. They worry it sounds combative, or that it is shorthand for rejecting science. Neither is true. Decolonizing psychology in Africa simply means recognizing two facts: first, that our discipline was largely imported, translated and standardized from contexts very different from ours; and second, that the communities we work with already had — and still have — sophisticated systems of understanding the mind, emotion, suffering, family, and meaning.

To decolonize is therefore not to discard. It is to ask, before reaching for an imported instrument, whether the question itself has been honestly framed for the people in front of us.

What gets lost when we don’t

When African psychology imports its frameworks wholesale, three things tend to happen.

First, measurement gets distorted. Standardized scales validated in Berlin or Boston are applied to populations whose idioms of distress are different — and we end up with prevalence numbers that overestimate some conditions, underestimate others, and miss whole categories entirely. The “somatic” complaints that flood African primary-care clinics are not always anxiety in disguise; sometimes they are a culturally legible language of suffering that our scales were never built to hear.

Second, interventions get flattened. A bereavement protocol designed for nuclear families in low-density societies often makes little sense in communities where mourning is communal, intergenerational and ritually staged. Imposed protocols feel cold, and clients quietly disengage.

Third — and most expensive in the long run — the next generation of scholars learns to mistrust their own intuitions. Bright graduate students develop a habit of citing Western authorities for claims that any elder in their home village could have made more precisely.

What indigenous knowledge actually offers

Across more than a decade of fieldwork — in Luhya communities of western Kenya, among Turkana youth, in palliative care wards in Nairobi, and in cross-cultural collaborations from Uganda to South Africa — I keep being struck by how much rigorous psychology already lives inside African traditions.

Take emotion regulation. Luhya communities transmit, across generations, a repertoire of proverbs, songs, kinship practices and ritual responses to specific emotional states. They are not random folklore. They are structured, teachable, and predictably effective. Documented properly, they constitute a body of psychological knowledge no less serious than the cognitive-behavioral techniques we routinely teach in postgraduate programs.

Or take thanatology. African death-and-dying practices have been managing complicated grief, intergenerational trauma and existential meaning-making for centuries before “grief stages” were ever published. The job of a decolonized researcher is not to dismiss them as anecdotal — it is to study them with the same methodological care we would apply to any clinical intervention.

Three honest shifts a decolonized psychology requires

If we are serious about this work, three shifts have to happen — and none of them are romantic.

1. Methodological pluralism. Quantitative methods are not the enemy. But neither are they sufficient. Ethnography, oral-history, participatory action research and community-based ethics review have to sit at the same table as randomized trials. At CIR-Lab we train every fellow in at least one qualitative and one quantitative tradition because real African questions almost never fit inside one.

2. Authorship from inside. The continent must publish, not just be published about. That means investing in journal editorial roles, mentoring African early-career researchers into first-authorship, and treating co-authorship with international collaborators as a starting position rather than a ceiling.

3. Curriculum reform. A psychology curriculum that teaches Freud in semester one and gets to “non-Western perspectives” in an elective in year three has its priorities backwards for an African university. Indigenous knowledge belongs in foundational coursework, not in a tasteful appendix.

What this looks like in practice

I want to be concrete, because grand statements are easy and small choices are hard. Here are some of the practical things our team and partners are doing right now.

• Running multi-site studies on indigenous emotion regulation and longevity designed in collaboration with community elders, and publishing back to communities in their own languages.
• Maintaining a tiered mentorship model where senior scholars walk alongside emerging researchers for an entire year — co-designing studies, co-writing manuscripts, and co-presenting findings.
• Building African–European and African–North American collaborations where the African investigators set the research questions, not just the data-collection logistics. You can browse some of these on the research projects page.
• Translating findings into briefs that ministries of health, dioceses and NGO partners can actually use.

A discipline worth inheriting

Decolonization is, in the end, a deeply hopeful project. It is not about resenting the contributions of global psychology; it is about adding to them — generously, rigorously, and from a place we know intimately.

If you are a young African scholar reading this, you are not late. The continent needs your eye, your language and your patience. If you are an international collaborator, you are welcome — provided you are willing to listen first and publish second.

And if you are a clinician, a teacher, a parent, or simply someone who has ever sat at a graveside in your own community and felt that something important was being held that no textbook had ever named — you already know more than you think. Our job, as researchers, is to make that knowing visible.

That is the psychology we are trying to build.

Want to follow this work? Explore CIR-Lab’s current projects, browse our publications, or get in touch about collaborating.