Doctoral degree is perceived as the highest level of certified formal education. It is the source of valuable contribution to the new knowledge. However, attaining doctoral degree in most institutions is a challenging exercise. The challenges emerge from many facets accumulated as strength or weakness of students and supervisors. This paper eludes some challenges that are experienced during the pursuance of PhDs in most African countries. The factors could be globally, however all the interviewees were from Africa, and some were educated in Africa and some beyond Africa. The study has utilised the gathering of professors and senior lecturers who participated in the training of various research methods tailed for supervisors of PhD students in Kampala, Uganda. Hence, the study is a case study which utilised interview, observation and open questionnaire as the major data collection strategies. The respondents were divided into five thematic groups of five respondents, and the answers were on agreement of the entire group. Each group was requested to enumerate challenges students face during the pursuance of PhD program, noting that the supervisors of today were students in the past. The training was conducted for two weeks, hence the study benefited from accessing academicians in their togetherness. We conclude that challenges that face students are essentially divided into two major groups. Those related to the weakness of the students geminating from their backgrounds, which include absence of proper mentorship on research; and those related to the weakness of supervisors geminating from weak mentorship during acquisition of the past degree awards, and those related with lack of exposure on varied methods of accomplishing research work for the award of doctoral degree.