The Science for Africa Foundation: How scientists should be treated by the scientific community in the north of Africa, or how they might impact the research landscape of the continent
Journal editors in the north network with scientists at conferences from countries like the United States and Europe. African researchers have less access to these networks, owing to the financial cost and difficulties in accessing visas.
If a research submission from less renowned scientists is subject to a lot of scrutiny by journal editors in the global north, it can create a reaction similar to the one received by African researchers.
Selective journals tend to favour big, ‘splashy’ results that are much more likely to be generated from resource-intense research environments. It is demanded that submissions provide the sort of complete data analysis and ancillary documentation that comes from the work of specialists, such as biostatisticians, that are part of many research teams in the north, but less so in the south.
It is said that African researchers should dedicate their limited resources to operational and translation sciences, rather than discovery science. Africa has the most diverse genetics in the world, and could be used as a base for precision medicine that takes into account patient data as well as large data sets.
There is also less of a culture of peer review in Africa than in the global north and African researchers are much less frequently invited to review manuscripts by selective journals. Active participation in peer review allows an early chance to view new findings and gives researchers an insight into how peer review works, for when they submit their own papers.
We must refuse to submit ourselves to the tyranny of the impact factor — at best, an extremely biased measure of actual ‘impact’. When considering candidates for grant funding, hiring, awards, or promotion, research leaders and administrators should take journal titles out of CVs. They must show leadership within their teams by encouraging submissions to open journals. Although an investigator’s publication record remains a good reflection of their impact, this can be measured by a variety of alternative metrics, such as views, downloads and collaborations.
Through the Science for Africa (SFA) Foundation, we have noted that quality science is a product of conducive and supportive research environments. Yet many researchers on the continent continue to work in under-resourced environments with poor or no infrastructure, including unsatisfactory buildings, a lack of state-of-the-art equipment and little or no access to technology platforms.
The SFA Foundation has invested roughly $100 million over the past two years to resourcing African institutions and help them develop the infrastructure and environment needed to conduct quality research.
Underlying this is a general expectation from policy watchers and researchers that African nations should invest in science and technology to power Africa’s economic transformation. The African Union wants all its member states to spend at least 1% of their GDP on research and development. Egypt has achieved this in the past few years according to World Bank data.
Olusola Oyewole, secretary-general of the Association of African Universities (AAU) in Accra, Ghana, says that although the agenda holds promise for Africa, it needs to ensure that all universities and industries across the continent work together to harness its benefits for good. He is worried that there will be a few institutions that don’t benefit.
It may take a few years before the next EU research programme starts, even though there could be an Africa–EU science fund one day.
There are some funding mechanisms that exist. ARISE, the African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence, was set up in 2020 with funding of €25 million (US$27.20 million) from the EU. The African Academy of Sciences (AAS), a non-profit organization, provides research grants and supports 45 principal investigators in 38 countries across Africa. ARISE helps grant recipients establish links and collaborations with universities and institutions in Africa and Europe, facilitating knowledge exchange.
The AAS said the implementation is being shepherded by a committee which is made up of representatives from the EU and theAU. The structure of ARISE mitigates its exposure to internal and external risks. Ogega clarifies that despite the “disruption that affected part of the AAS’s work in 2021, ARISE’s implementation went on uninterrupted”.
The crisis awakened African science, at least in part. EU–AU research collaboration grants should be documented live and in real-time on a public website, with penalties for non-compliance to ensure accountability and transparency, suggests Nadia Sam-Agudu, a paediatrician at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, who works at the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria in Abuja.
The former health minister of Rwanda says that research partnerships between global north and African scientists might perpetuate inequalities because of the historical colonial power imbalance. She says that it is still slavery if you have a good white master.
International collaboration is an essential force in science. But the nature and balance of partnerships often determines how beneficial they are to individuals, institutions and societies. Nowhere is this more true than in collaborations involving the global north and south.
There are caveats. The ‘global north’ and ‘global south’ are categories without definitive boundaries, so World Bank income groups were used to split countries. There are some arguable categorizations: South Africa is an upper middle-income country and a ‘global north’ country in the data. The same is true for much of Latin America. Data from health-sciences journals, recently added to the Nature Index, were not available for analysis (the supplement features separate data from the Digital Science Dimensions database to broaden subject scope).
