Science granting councils in Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends and tensions

Abstract

This article documents recent trends in science funding support in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We analyse these trends at the SSA regional level alongside a summary of four case studies of science funding in four Science Granting Councils (SGCs) in East Africa. Our findings support the literature on science funding in SSA regarding low levels of funding, cross-country engagement, and the need for capacity building. However, we also find there are tensions among funding and policy actors around the perceived ways in which investment in science will benefit society. We argue that the narratives and logics of science funders and their roots in ‘Republic of Science’ vs. ‘Embedded Autonomy’ rationales for SGC activity must be more transparent to enable critical engagement with the ideas being used to justify spending.

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“…To reiterate, science granting councils (SGCs), as used in this chapter, refer to organisations that fund, direct or manage science and/or research in 15 countries in SSA. These countries are part of the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) set up and funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the United Kingdom's (UK) Department for International Development (DFID) and South Africa's National Research Foundation (NRF) (Chataway et al 2017a(Chataway et al , 2019. The objective of the SGCI is to strengthen the SGCs' ability to manage, design and monitor research programmes; promote and support knowledge exchange with key ST&I stakeholders; and establish and foster partnerships among SGCs and ST&I stakeholders.…”

“…Rather than one pure Republic of Science, which those striving for relevance have to reign in, the view from low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) national-level research environments is often that it is the lack of effective autonomy for researchers and SGCs aiming to fund academic research at national level which inhibits productive engagement. 7 International research collaborations and international funders, looking for high-profile research publications relating to the scientific frontier, skew prioritisation (Chataway et al 2019). Rather than a straight trade-off between a cohesive collective of scientists on the one hand and policy-makers on the other hand, the issue of autonomy from this perspective relates to the degree of space that national-level actors have.…”

“…For example, in our recent study of SGCs, interviewees from SGCs and researchers themselves framed the issue of autonomy in different ways. In one framing, lack of political and economic space and resources was seen by a number of interviewees in different East African countries as a problem for national science funders (Chataway et al 2019) who have fragile and compromised capacities to define agendas, which are truly in the public interest in SSA countries. Lack of various sorts of capital (social, political and economic) can inhibit effective operation and engagement between scientists and broader society at the national level.…”