In 2009 Sephis has launched an “Africa-Asia-Latin America” collaborative research grants programme. The main objective of the programme is to involve more scholars in the South in inter-regional and international comparative research networks. Trained in the adverse circumstances of structural adjustment programmes and a deepening economic crisis, most researchers in the South face severe obstacles in doing comparative research and working in and with the global academic community.

The broad theme of the collaborative research programme is “Rethinking Histories, Nations and Trans-Regional Connections”. Since the 1970s social scientists and historians have been concerned with redefining their disciplines as well as the objects and forms of narration including the non-academic and non-Western ways of writing and circulating knowledge. The issues raised in the context of the debates have been methodological, theoretical as well as geographical - questioning Europe and the West as the master references in relation to colonial and postcolonial peripheries. This collaborative research programme aims to enable further South-South comparative historical research, to break out of the mould of the usual comparisons and push the boundaries of the comparative method.

In 2009 3 collaborative research grants were awarded;

1. Troubling Memories: A History of Identities from India, South Africa and Argentina
2. Rethinking National History in the Margins of the State: Local Narratives in Times of Conflicts and Transformation
3. Health and Development in Africa and the African Diaspora: Benin, Brazil and the British Caribbean since the Second Half of the 19th Century