Local research ought to be independent
Dependence on the global North and little recognition in Africa itself – we look at why science in Africa has a lot of room for improvement.
Local research in Africa is about to get a boost. This is the headquarters of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, located in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. | Image: Africa CDC
According to Nature magazine, 18 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa. However, “it only produces 1% to 2% of the global research and innovation outputs”. On average, African countries spend 0.42 percent of their GDP on research, compared to a global average of 1.7 percent.
The reasons for this are complicated. Research in Africa depends to a large degree on monies received from partners in the global North, and so remains in thrall to their “fluctuations of funding and vagaries”, as Nature explains. But there are other reasons too, says Salim Abdool Karim – he’s South African, and is currently a professor of global health at Columbia University, USA, and director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA): “In Africa, we have not understood that making our countries competitive in science will also make them competitive economically. We continue to view research as an expense, rather than an economic investment”.
The African members of the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) have now published a working paper entitled “Research Funding Flows in and for Africa” in which they propose an “African Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum as a collective platform for stakeholders to address […] challenges and set priorities”. Its aim is to bring together stakeholders and political decision-makers and to promote “a unified African voice to empower the continent’s research ecosystem”, according to the platform SciDev.Net. Farai Kapfudzaruwa of the University of Pretoria says: “In addition to getting African countries to prioritise improving funding for science, an African science policy would also enable external funders to be aware of the continent’s priorities”
Raji Tajudeen, the head of public health institutes and research at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, is of a similar opinion: “People fly in from the global North with their proposals and methodology, with the way they want to do things, and there is no clear-cut role for local researchers – I think that needs to stop”, he says.
