Abstract

Partnerships with international bodies can strengthen research output, teaching capacity, and global visibility for statistics and data science units in low- and middle-income settings. This paper reports on the collaboration between the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and two international partners, Statistics Without Borders (SWB) of the American Statistical Association and the Amazon Generative AI Innovation Centre. The collaboration covered joint research, training, and workshops for academic staff, undergraduate students, and postgraduate students. The Collaborations have improved graduate student quality in the department and entrepreneurship among postgraduate students. The collaboration also led to a joint research African-led NeurIPS publication.
This paper describes how each partnership was set up, the activities it produced, and the outcomes we recorded: joint research projects, workshops reaching staff and students, and papers accepted at NeurIPS. We also discuss challenges, including limited funding, unreliable connectivity and computing resources, and travel and visa barriers, along with how we handled them. The paper closes with practical recommendations for institutions that want to build similar partnerships. These include agreeing shared goals early, linking training to real research problems, training staff first, and planning for sustainability from the start.