Calls to reward researchers for doing demand-driven research

The time has come for the African research community to begin conducting more demand-driven research that can inform policy-making and create an impact on society.

This community must respond to rising ‘clamour’ from different quarters calling for an end to doing research for its own sake, and engage in research endeavours that could easily be translated into action, to help meet the continent’s huge development needs.

There is also urgency to ensure that researchers conduct research that can be used, shared with communities and break with the common practice of keeping research findings on shelves or in laboratories.

A debate on the relevance of research has started dominating African and global discussions, meaning that it is time to ensure that research begins to “touch people’s lives” to ensure that it is not only impactful, but transformative as well, said Professor Richard Mkandawire, the Africa Director of the Alliance for African Partnership (AAP).

“Already there is huge outcry from development partners, politicians, communities and even farmers over [the] continued conduct of research for its own sake. We are being asked as universities to do more impactful research and that is right because that is what we are created to do,” he added.

The AAP was taking steps to engage decision-makers in Africa to demonstrate to them that the research they were undertaking was relevant to the needs of the Africa and its people, he said.

“The alliance is also reaching out to the decision-makers in order to influence change and to influence reforms, because that’s why universities exist,” he told a recent webinar, ‘Demand-Driven Research in Africa’.

Demand-driven research is characterised by its responsiveness to the needs and priorities of stakeholders, including policy-makers, practitioners and communities affected by the issues being studied, according to a concept paper developed for the public dialogue event.

The concept emphasises the need for research that is directly relevant to the challenges faced by decision-makers, the goal being informing evidence-based policy and programmes.

It observes: “The recognition that traditional, supply-driven research approaches, where researchers determine the focus of their work without direct input from stakeholders, may not always produce relevant findings for policy and programme development.”

Building networks

For example, the AAP has reached out to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) with the aim of exploring how think tanks in the region can begin to “input into development priorities” set out by the body, he added.

In addition, the AAP was engaging the African Union Commission with the aim of exploring how researchers can be “facilitated” to contribute more in achieving the AU’s continental blueprint – Agenda 2063 – he disclosed.

As a result, they have been invited to participate in preparing documents to participate in a summit tackling agricultural problems.

“You can only be invited to such when you demonstrate that research you are doing is relevant and capable of transforming Africa,” he noted.

The alliance was also committed to fostering knowledge among researchers by facilitating [the] exchange of knowledge among them, Mkandawire added.

Restructuring academics’ incentives

One way of ensuring that researchers were more focused on demand-driven research was by “restructuring incentives systems” in universities, to ensure that academics do not do research with their eyes only on publishing in high-impact journals.

As matters stand in many institutions, promotions in Africa and other forms of recognition were based on publishing in such journals as well as maximum citations, which needs to change if evidence-informed and impactful research were to be prioritised, said Chris Chibwana, the programme officer in gender equity and governance at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, United States.

By their nature, universities were generally “benevolent” in the focus of the research they conducted, but the need to be career-wise made many researchers in the institutions prioritise getting citations rather than doing demand-driven research.

He added: “We also know that universities also improve their rankings when the research they conduct is more widely cited.”

Currently, he observed, only those academics who are widely published cared about demand-driven research, since they did not need to publish a lot to progress in the workplaces.

The need to shift towards impactful research that supports decision-making is especially urgent, in view of increasingly limited resources and budgets available to support research in Africa, Chibwana observed.

“We shouldn’t be doing research just for the sake of doing it. Research has to have a purpose, and this means we must strive to make it more decision-relevant so that, ultimately, it improves lives,” he emphasised.

Funders, he observed, had a big role to play in ensuring that research in Africa is demand-driven and, even though, ideally, they should not be the ones setting the agenda, they can still direct researchers on where research would provide evidence for decision-making.

In as much as all researchers’ main motivation in engaging various endeavours was to create an impact in society, “institutional structural incentives” often stood on their way, the main one being the fact that universities evaluated them on the basis of their publication as opposed to impact, said Joost de Laat, an economics professor at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

There was, however, “some movement” being made among European universities, including Utrecht, where a “triple method” of evaluating researchers was emerging, and where impact was one of the considerations, as the institutions sought to broaden assessment criteria, he explained.

One way of overcoming the problem also lay in not changing the incentives methods only, but also in universities beginning to teach impact evaluation methods to students, who are both the future researchers and policy-makers as well, to entrench the demand-driven research concept, the professor said.

“So many young researchers would want to spend time doing impactful work, but they also have to balance this with their scholarly careers. It is time for universities to start evaluating their staff differently by relooking at incentives that stand in the way of impactful research,” he added.

Engaging the public

According to Dr Elizabeth Mkandawire of the University of Pretoria, researchers have, for a long time, worked in isolation and the time had come for them to come out of their ivory towers, and embrace new ways of doing research.

This included doing their work across disciplines, doing so in an ethical way, engaging in science communication and engaging different actors.

Top among them should be the public, who should be involved at all stages of the research process, as opposed to involving them only at the dissemination stage, added Elizabeth Mkandawire, the network and research manager of Food Systems Research Networks for Africa.

“What we do as researchers has to have impact and be useful and useable by the world; after all, we do not get funded for any other purpose than to provide evidence to inform decisions,” she observed.

One challenge that stood in the way of this research approach was the failure of researchers to engage and nurture relationships with policy-makers, which would be important in understanding exactly the kind research that is relevant in decision-making.

The fact that research in African universities and other institutions is largely externally funded, owing to low-level funding by governments, was also a major obstacle, she noted.