Initiatives to enhance African Environmental Science

START has made a significant contribution to capacity development all around the world but particularly so in Africa. They developed a model which lead to the holistic development of the person as well as maintaining an excellent quality of scientifc outputs. This model has been adopted and developed further by three other programmes which are discussed in this paper. The three programmes are 1) Building the Next Generation of African Scholars, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, 2) The Climate Leadership Programme funded by the BMZ Ministry in Germany through GIZ and 3) The Post-graduate Curriculum Initiative for Global Change funded by the Open Society Foundation.