ABSTRACT
The challenges of supervision are both practical and cultural. Postgraduate supervision in the developing world is in its infancy. Institutions in the developing world are catalysts for economic and cultural empowerment – creating the next generation of leaders. Higher education, therefore, has a local responsibility, forcing us to question how well its policies actually relate to the lived experiences of students and their supervisors. Graduate supervision is a dynamic undertaking – where supervisors are charged to ensure sound guidance and sound outputs, but the “traditional” model of supervision in the developing world has led to high levels of attrition. The methods and motives of graduate supervision that have been developed in the Global North may well be presented as all-embracing and generalisable but this may simply be a bi-product of a cultural superiority complex – where individuals in such environments feel that they know best and that their truth is true for all others.
