The Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building (IAP) is a research consortium involving all of the nine universities on the island of Ireland together with four African universities, with the overall aim of building research capacity for poverty reduction. The project was supported by a three-year grant from Irish Aid. This article examines the achievements of IAP and argues that the "foresight" approach and methodology used to generate the health and education research priorities can make a useful contribution not only to development research, but also to adult education. (Contains 4 tables and 1 footnote.)