Compare Podcast Episode 3: In Conversation with Compare Fellows

Professor Catherine Montgomery: Hello, and Welcome to the Compare Podcast Series!  I am Professor Catherine Montgomery. I am a Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Durham in the UK. I’m also the Deputy Executive Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. And one of the Editors of Compare.

This is the third podcast in the Compare and BAICE podcast series. And for our third episode, we’ll be talking to – Dr Salome Joy Awidi, Dr Lisnet Mwadzaangati, and Dr Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw – who are the Compare Fellows. Compare Fellowship is a mentorship programme run by journal Compare and BAICE to support early career academics from the Global South in disseminating their research and scholarship to a global audience. We will talk to Salome, Lisnet, and Jerusalem about their experience of Compare Fellowship. 

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Catherine Montgomery: Welcome to Compare Podcast – Salome, Lisnet, and Jerusalem. Its really great to have a chance to work with you as Compare Fellows and talk to you for this podcast . I just wondered if you could just briefly introduce yourselves if each person could say just something briefly about their context and where they are. So let’s start with Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: Thank you very much for this chance. I am Jerusalem Yibeltal, and I work at one of the Ethiopian universities, Bahir Dar University. I am an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Education. My research interests include graduate employment, education and employment, higher education and linkages with employability skills, and gender, education and development. 

Catherine Montgomery: Fantastic! Thank you, Jerusalem. Thanks very much, and perhaps Lisnet now. Would you like to tell us very briefly about yourself?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Thank you very much, Catherine. I am Lisnet Mwadzaangati. I am an Associate Professor in Mathematics Education at the University of Malawi. Thank you.

Catherine Montgomery: Great, thank you! And Salome?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, thank you, Catherine and my colleagues. My name is Salome Awidi. I am based in Uganda. And I have been working in refugee education in Uganda for the last many years, and I’m affiliated with Gulu University. However, I also work with Finn Church Aid, a refugee agency in Uganda. Thank you!

Catherine Montgomery: That’s brilliant! It’s amazing to have three different countries represented this morning. It’s really exciting to have you on the call. So, in today’s conversation, we would love to get to know you and your experiences with the Compare Fellowship. Could you start by sharing how you first heard about the Compare Fellowship and what motivated you to apply, and if you encountered any challenges or surprises along the way? Let’s maybe start with Jerusalem again.

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: OK, thank you for this question. The complete Fellowship experience and the mentorship programme were really incredible. I have made submissions to different international journals. I was writing lots of manuscripts with friends and by myself. We also tried our best to publish in different peer-reviewed international journals. We tried our best. I mean, I would say that for the last decade, we have had lots of rejections from those international journals. Of course, some are published. So, what would be the problem? I mean, how can we really improve ourselves to get published in different journals? That was always in our minds, me and my colleagues. So, one of our colleagues – he was a Lecturer here in Bahir Dar University. He is now working at Cambridge University of Cambridge, where he shared different kinds of scholarships just to try. He encourages us to compete for that Compare Fellowship. We are really grateful, and we appreciate his effort, and we tried it out. The first time, I couldn’t get the chance. But for the next time, I tried my best and improved myself, with different kinds of capacity building. And then, I got the chance to be a Compare Fellow. Professor Ricardo is my mentor. Professor Ricardo has the same research interest as me in economics. Yeah, I am very much interested in working with different econometrics methodologies and econometrics tools, and a more specific idea was to work with youth employment and labour market engagements. So, I just focused on gender and how gender is treated in labour markets as my engagements throughout the Fellowship. So, I had engagements with Professor Ricardo for almost a week or two weeks. I really benefited from this mentorship, and, most importantly, when I also came to Cambridge, I saw lots of things I could observe – how a world-class University operates. So the journey is really incredible, I would say.

Catherine Montgomery: That was really interesting, Jerusalem; thank you so much. You’ve answered a couple of the questions there, so that’s really helpful. Let’s move on to Salome. Can you talk to us now?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, of course. I was the Compare Fellow for 2022 -2023. At the time, Catherine, I was engaged in a research project here in Uganda at Gulu University and the University of Nottingham – a project called DRIVE. DRIVE is Disabled Refugees’ Included and Visible in Education. So, it was basically a project that looked at educational inclusion and the exclusion of refugee children in Uganda. So, that was kind of my link to the mentor that I eventually got to work with. Through that research project, I also benefited from a British Academy scholarship programme – 2 two-week workshops for young authors, where we had an online engagement with our mentors to learn how to write academic journals and manuscripts. So, two weeks became a very short period to learn and all that I needed to learn, so it was at that point that my mentor introduced and shared with me the call for Compare Fellowship. And I did apply, and I think I put him as one of my referees. And my submission was accepted, and that’s how I got myself to Compare Fellowship. Challenges you asked maybe -at the time, I was excited about the possibility of learning to be an Academy greater myself but also to support other young authors in developing their writing skills. At the time, I was the president of Professional Association of Educators in Uganda, and we were struggling with the lack of data; people lack the skills to write for journals, so I was excited about it. And I must say I thought it was a wonderful opportunity. Thank you. 

Catherine Montgomery: Fantastic! That’s great, Salome. Very interesting! It was really interesting to hear about your project. Lisnet, would you be able to talk to us?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Thank you very much. So, I will start with where how I heard about the Fellowship – it was on our mailing list. I just saw that someone just posted that there was this opportunity for the Fellowship. At that time, I was a young researcher who had just finished my PhD. Then, I was looking for a Fellowship to help me improve my academic writing skills and other experiences. So, of course, I saw that it was going to be mainly online, and also I would be doing it while I was waiting. There was also an opportunity for a conference on academic writing. Those are the things that I was looking for. When I saw it, I was motivated to apply. When I applied, I got accepted, and I was allocated a mentor. I was in touch with Yusuf Sayed from the University of Sussex. It was during the pandemic, so this was one of the things that kept me busy. At that time, the university was closed, and we were not teaching. So, I said – let me do this to keep me busy. When I talked with Professor Sayed about my research interests, he was positive about them. But it is something that maybe he was it was not of interest to me because I’m a mathematics education lecturer, and do qualitative research – so the aim is improving our teaching and maybe also improving the quality of our training and in-service features. So, if I have to mention anything as a challenge – that I would mention as a challenge – that our disciplines were quite different. So I needed to do a lot of explaining – which was not a problem – also, our approaches to research were different. He was more quantitative; I am more qualitative. I think the methodology samples – very small sample data and doing in-depth analysis. But still, l could argue and then agree. And I could write something to him. It was a very good learning process, through which I improved my writing. So, what I was doing – like I said, we were under lockdown at some point – and then I could get the views from him, not only that I was writing under his mentorship and other papers that I was writing. So, by the end of that period, I managed to publish, I think, two papers before the Compare paper was published.

Catherine Montgomery: that’s great! All three were really interesting experiences. I think all of you have highlighted the importance of the mentor there and your relationship with your mentor. Lisnet, even though you didn’t have the same kind of match for research interests, it was not perfect. I think that it was probably still a positive relationship, as you’ve just said. So it’s really good to hear about how that mentor relationship is really key to the Fellowship, and all of your experiences. They’re really interesting. You’ve all mentioned publications there; we all know that the publication landscape in higher education and the global landscape is very unfair. It is very, very difficult for early career scholars to break into. I wondered if you have publication plans from now and perhaps could say a little bit about that. Jerusalem, do you have any plans for publications?

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: Oh yes, as I told you, some of the manuscripts articles these days I am extracting from my dissertation – data from my dissertation as like baseline assessment, as it informed me to see some future engagements of women in the labour market. So I collected data from the online secondary data secondary sources of data. So, I saw data from the ILO – International Labour Organisation – and the Ministry of Education. You know, in Ethiopia, most of the time, what was the problem when I was writing my dissertation? We didn’t have data, well-organised data online. You could not find employment data or graduates’ enrolment data. Even ILO didn’t do something with the data – doing something about the issues related to the workers and the issue of the labour market. But it didn’t give us data online, in an organised manner. So when I was doing my PhD, what was the problem was finding data and finding those graduates – I mean, how could I find the graduates from different scattered places? So, I took data from these two universities – the 1st generation universities – and a bit of data from the archives. At Bahir Dar University, it was well-organised data, which surprised me, but at different universities in my nation, I couldn’t find that kind of well-organised data, so I chose these two universities for comparative purposes. Finding data was very challenging, and it is still challenging to get organised data. So, these days, what surprised me was that I saw data from the ILO employment – the time series data of the people in the labour market. I got that, and I put that in EViews – most of the time, I used that for an econometric analysis list to predict the future labour market opportunities of women in Ethiopia. So, I tried to draft my manuscript on how these graduates have future labour market engagement. I did this analysis when I saw their engagement. It still remains constant – the disparities between men and women – it continues to be constant. I mean, the disparities for the coming seven years – I started using the ARIMA model – the autoregressive integrated moving average – so I used the model, so when I saw disparities in their engagement or opportunities of women – it seemed similar – I mean, the disparity will continue. I drafted that paper for the upcoming publication. I also submitted another manuscript, which we were working on with Ricardo – where I really learned a lot of things, I mean in terms of statistics, in terms of methodology, and in terms of analysis, citations – all those kinds of things. And I’m really glad that I got lots of articles from Compare – that was free access for me as a Compare Fellow – that was a great opportunity. I got lots of articles; I read some of them and highlighted some of them to support my study.

Catherine Montgomery: that’s really interesting! You highlight a really interesting point there about access to data, publications, and journals that might be kind of behind the paywalls. So, thank you very much for that. And I just wondered about the others – maybe Salome. Would you like to come in and tell us a bit about – what your publication plans are?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, of course! So we’ve been working on this… first of all, maybe to share that – coming out of the UKFIET conference last year – I was able to do a blog on the piece that I was working on. Yeah, so Elizabeth Walton – my mentor, and I have been working on this article – I know it has dragged, but it’s almost ready; I’m working on the referencing now. And we should be able to submit that soon. But maybe I should also note that although the Compare journal articles have been delayed from the time that we started the membership to now, I have, I think, put out three different publications relating to inclusive education and livelihood for refugees. I think to summarise, I think my technical skills and experience in academic writing have really improved. I have gained quite a bit of confidence in the way that I write. And I must say- that the last three or four articles that I have written are less traumatic compared to those that I wrote at my PhD – out of my PhD thesis. So yes, I think I have a bit more experience. But, of course, I am still learning.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s fantastic, Salome! and I think you make an excellent point there about confidence and you know the relationship between experience and confidence – you know really helps in publication, doesn’t it? And in your research and moving forward. How about you, Lisnet? 

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Yes, I do. I think my Compare article was published in December 2023, and from that time or since that time I was after submitting the article and during the process of peer review, I was also still writing or still applying the skills that I learned through during this mentorship and Fellowship – to other paper that I was writing. Because as an academician – there is no way I can stop publishing… it’s a must. Like Salome, I also would like to echo the same to say that the experience is just a bit different. I know there is so much funding that has to be done when you have the data. But sometimes it was difficult to say then what should I focus on, and where do I should start from, how do I write? so it could take you months while I was thinking about – how I could maybe approach the data or how I could start writing something from the data and where I would start writing. so through this Fellowship – and maybe also because of how I was learning through my mentor – then kind of a bit different approach – I know we use different approaches, but they weren’t bad – I think what I learned from Professor Yusuf was very important because at first, I used to think – let me right to the introduction, let me the write the literature review, and then I would go maybe to write the findings and the discussions… But during the process – one of the things that I learned from Professor Yusuf was that – maybe you could start from the findings, read it through several times – to see what story you wanted to tell from the findings, then you can maybe when you have done that then you can be thinking of the other sections – that would maybe link with the other sections. Because my problem or my challenge – in most of the review feedback that I get from reviewers was maybe a lack of linking – maybe the introduction, the literature review and the findings – they were not speaking to each other – not telling maybe the same story. But then, when I started this approach of starting with the data itself – engaging with the data – seeing what you can argue from the data – what you can write and derive – this process is a bit shorter for me – maybe to come up with the paper. I am working very hard, and if I have time, then within maybe months, I can be able to produce something without much stress and maybe with confidence as well. To answer your question, yes, I’m still doing… I do have papers which I have already submitted to other journals, and I’m still continuing to do that. But like I said, that is my experience. Maybe you correct me, or maybe not, but I was still asking myself if I could submit another paper to Compare Journal. Would it be accepted? So I was asking myself that question because I saw when I read the papers – most of them, I think, and like I said – they are large volumes of data, and also size in terms of sample – so I try to look for general journals which are kind of I think it also may be balancing between similar size examples or maybe qualitative approaches and quantitative approaches, and the like. So, if I were to submit to Compare – I would ask myself a question – I know that’s what you are, not what you ask me. Because the limitation was that one…one of the things that I kept on arguing with my mentor – he wanted me to move out of that box and then start thinking about a larger volume of data, and also large samples, maybe. But it is not my interest because I’m interested in improving the quality they practise while teaching – by maybe observing the data instead, and maybe also me doing the teaching. Yeah, that’s it, Catherine.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great, Lisnet! That’s really interesting! And what’s what it’s great to hear in what all of you said is how it’s not just that the article in Compare but going through that process obviously has a knock-on effect to other publications, and you know increases your confidence, increases your experience. And, now I feel a feel like all of you are talking about the importance of data, the importance of kind of ways of writing – so that is really fantastic to hear. And it kind of leads on to the sort of the final questions that we’ve got – which really just maybe quite briefly, if you just let us know how being a Compare Fellow has shaped your future aspirations for research or collaboration – either within your own country or within the academic community globally. Shall we start again with Jerusalem? Would you like to say something here?

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: When Compare Fellowship – it’s already known that how it increases your confidence – even to think, to write, and even to present something in different public gatherings outside – for instance, last time there was – I think that might be that the part of the Compare Fellowship, I don’t know or the British Academy – again they have the project here Bahar Dar University – it’s a collaboration between our university and East London University – their project was working in solidarity with Ethiopian research universities – and its about the issue of mentoring, mentorship. So, where I got the invitation to share my experience with the PhD students and early career researchers – where I had very good interaction with people and also continued to be selected as a mentor – you might have information about that, and that might be – I told that this is the impact of the Fellowship that the Compare – it gives me a great confidence to show my experience in a very creative and critical manner. 

Professor Catherine Montgomery: That’s wonderful, Jerusalem. It’s really good to know! And how about you, Salome?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, certainly! It did shape my career and my progress as a young researcher from the Global South. I did observe earlier – that I actually Compare Fellowship, I was able to attend the UKFIET conference from which I made quite a number of networks – I noticed that there were so many researchers that were working in refugee education in Uganda that in the country had not noticed. So definitely, my networks have grown, and since then, I have ventured into impact evaluation – there is a research institution in Nairobi – at my organisation, I became the coordinator for research projects, so I think in many ways it has shaped my career development, and I have a feeling it will continue to do so for a while.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s fantastic, thank you, Salome! And Lisnet – how about you? what do you feel the impact of the Fellowship has been?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: I think I would be repeating this same in terms of – if we have to talk about the impact. For me, mainly the writing part – I did not attend attend the UKFIET conference – because by visa was not arriving when the conference was starting. So I presented my work to a group of people, during a seminar at the University of Cambridge. So, yeah, I got feedback and I got motivation to continue the research. Yeah, that’s what I would like to say as an impact for my future or my academic progress. Yeah, I think I could stop there. 

Catherine Montgomery: that’s great! thank you! And I remember that presentation at Cambridge; it was really good! and it was a good atmosphere there. So, that’s great! And finally, we’ve just got one more question to ask, which was – what advice or tips would you offer to future Compare Fellows or maybe people who are thinking about applying to the Fellowship – would you have any advice for them? Jerusalem. let’s begin with you, if that’s OK.

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: So my advice to the future Compare Fellows – I mean they don’t ignore any kinds of details – I mean that was one because of the challenges that I faced when I was a mentee in Cambridge. They should record everything, quite deep quantitative data – especially the qualitative data – recording is everything – every detail is very important. When they are working with their mentor – they have to try different kinds of I mean methodologies and have to fit in different technological and the current engagements of the world – through different algorithms. That was also one of the problems when I was working with my mentor, and it was sometimes a problem for my mentor. When I was challenged with some technological or methodological issue, So, they had to use different opportunities that I got, … they had to use all these opportunities that they got from Compare Fellowship. From the process, they have to entertain all those challenges –treat challenges as a lesson and try for the future. So, it might be great if they get the chance to be Compare Fellows – of course, it demands lots of things – hard work that the mentorship expects of us – but that might give them the drive to research, and different kinds of networking opportunities,  

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great. thank you so much, Jerusalem, thanks! And Salome, do you have any advice, on top of what Jerusalem said?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, of course. I think the Fellowship offers such a great opportunity for networking. But also access to resources…working with my mentor gave me access to the whole library, which I have been able to use even for my other interests outside the Fellowship. So, I think it’s a very rich platform. It’s a huge opportunity – gatherings of like-minded people that should be taken advantage of… for the advancement of research interest and for access to relevant, up-to-date material. 

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great. Thank you, Solome! Lisnet, any advice?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Yeah, I think I would advise them to go ahead… it’s a rewarding experience. I remember I also motivated one of our colleagues to apply – I don’t know if he applied or not; he did not update me on the feedback anyway. But I am sure, maybe he applied. I told him about the benefits – that he would be given a mentor and then would be assisted. Yeah, of course, I know that – it is also a gamble because it also all depends on the mentor – the relationship between you and the mentor, and how the mentor is committed to doing that type of work. I’m saying this because maybe for me, maybe we took too long – maybe because I was waiting, maybe I could not submit my paper before I attended when I came to the UK. So, it took a long time, and we could spend more time without meeting in between. Sometimes, the feedback was not that supportive or motivating to keep you going. But maybe I know that maybe it’s taken almost two years, instead of one year – due to COVID and the likes – so maybe we spent a long time together and we got used to each other, and the progress maybe started to stagnate a little bit. So yeah, I would advise them to apply… I would motivate them. I always motivate them – I always submit/circulate when I see the advert, and I also tell them to be open-minded.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great, Listnet! Thank you so much! And thank you to all of you for all of those fantastic insights into the Fellowship.

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Yizengaw, J. Y. (2025). From university to the world of work: education and labour market experiences of women in STEM subjects in Ethiopia. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2025.2452503

Mwadzaangati, L. (2023). Malawian teachers’ agency in using teaching and learning resources: a product of quality teaching, learning resources and teacher education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2023.2292527

Mwadzaangati, L., & Kazima, M. (2019). An Exploration of Teaching for Understanding the Problem for Geometric Proof Development: The Case of Two Secondary School Mathematics Teachers. African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 23(3), 298–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/18117295.2019.1685221Mwadzaangati, L., Adler, J., & Kazima, M. (2022). Mathematics Mediational Means and Learner Centredness: Insights from ‘traditional’ Malawian Secondary School Geometry Lessons. African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 26(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/18117295.2022.2055910