Data provided here consists of the summaries of Covid 19 pandemic experiences of doctoral researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School under the Social Sciences for Severely Stigmatising Skin diseases (5S Foundation) in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Sudan. Conducting doctoral research is a challenging endeavour, a challenge which as the growing literature on the subject has shown, the COVD-19 pandemic has made even more so. For some doctoral researchers, however, the pandemic has also been accompanied by political unrest and military conflict, putting them and their networks at risk and making their research especially difficult to sustain. We have written about how we navigated doing doctoral studies during the period of the pandemic and socio-political unrest.