Research and Innovation Uptake Landscape in Rwanda: Analysis of the STI Framework

STI policy and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa: Fostering actors’ interactions in research and innovation

“…The first evaluation of Rwanda's STI policy, conducted in 2013, focused on four policy pillars: knowledge acquisition, knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and innovation culture (Murenzi and Hughes, 2006;Yongabo, 2021). The recommendations from that evaluation with respect to policy design, its implementation and STI governance included the need to: (a) streamline policy priorities to improve coherence; (b) develop policy implementation strategy, including community-based STI programmes for community engagement; and (c) cultivate innovation system functions among key actors (Farley et al, 2013: 9-10).…”

“…This disproportionately low R&D intensity in Rwanda's higher education system -in addition to the wide differences in its numbers of academic researchers with PhDs and production of PhD graduates compared to South Africa -explains in part the scanty R&I capacity and capabilities in Rwanda's higher education sector, with undesirable implications for the performance of the country's NSI (GoR, 2020b: 18). In addition to the aforementioned evidence, recent studies, including the Global Innovation Index (GII 2020), have demonstrated that, in Rwanda, the G in U-I-G became very strong, with U being the weakest and least connected actor in TH, pushing it (U) further into silos (GoR, 2020b;WIPO, 2020;Yongabo, 2021;Yongabo and Göransson, 2020). As a policy priority, promoting R&I capacity and development capability in (public and private) academia is paramount if Rwanda is to meet its expenditure target of 1% of GDP on R&D by 2024.…”

“…As frameworks to guide innovation policy and research, TH and NSI emphasise the importance of strong links, interactions and collaboration among actors -two of which are universities (or academia) and industry. As noted above, policy and scholarly discourse concerning university-industry collaboration have consistently found that inadequate cooperation among these actors plays a major role in hindering the performance of the NSI, especially in Africa and other low-and middle-income countries (Daniels et al, 2020(Daniels et al, , 2021Kruss and Visser, 2017;Yongabo, 2021). The extent to which STI policy is governed, and the manner in which structural settings are established, may facilitate or hinder the performance of the NSI.…”

“…However, in addition to weaknesses in interactions among STI ecosystem actors, evidence shows that STI policies and regulations in SSA, which to a large extent are formulated with the frameworks of the Triple Helix (TH) of universities, industry, and government (U-I-G) (Etzkowitz, 1996;Ranga and Etzkowitz, 2013) and National Systems of Innovation (NSI) (Freeman, 1987;Lundvall, 1992;Nelson, 1993), do not necessarily correlate with the context (Arocena et al, 2017;Diyamett et al, 2019). Hence, it becomes problematic to study the status of science, technology, research and innovation, and to measure innovation performance in these countries (Albuquerque et al, 2015;Yongabo, 2021). Innovations happen on various scales and in various forms relevant to the local context (Chataway et al, 2014).…”