Science fund for Africa urgent, says STISA review report

The final report compiled as part of the review of the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA-2024) is calling for the urgent establishment of an African Science, Technology and Innovation Fund (ASTIF) to ensure sustainable funding of the sector’s initiatives on the continent.

The draft report, discussed at a review meeting in Addis Ababa in December 2023, also calls on the African Union Commission (AUC), and the African Development Bank (AfDB) to hasten the merging of the ASTIF with the African Education Fund set up in 2016 to support education in the sciences.

In 2023, the AUC kicked off the process of reviewing its 10-year science blueprint, STISA-2024, with a view to coming up with a new document, the STISA-2034.

The commission has partnered with UNESCO to spearhead the process in the hope that a document focusing on the next decade will be ready by mid-2024.

In terms of the education fund, the draft report states: “It is critical that the formulation of STISA-2034 be linked directly to the process of completing the creation of the AESTI fund under the leadership of AUC and the AfDB.

“There should be no parallel processes, one for the strategy and another for the fund. In this regard, a key component of the STISA-2034 design phase should be resource budgeting and mobilisation with emphasis on financing mechanisms and instruments,” it notes.

This would call for funders, including the AfDB, partners such as UNESCO, the European Union and others that have been actively supporting STI in Africa, to be brought into the strategy design phase to help with the planning for resource mobilisation and allocation mechanisms.

An STI fund could, through an appropriate mechanism, facilitate the funding of joint or collaborative African researcher projects, as well as multilateral African university chairs programmes under the auspices of the Association of African Universities.

Stakeholder participation in process

The draft further notes that there was inadequate stakeholders’ engagement in the formulation of the expiring STISA-2024 making it a “largely top-down, technocratic and expert-driven process”, which seems to have undermined broad-based buy-in.

Among the 11 recommendations, the document, therefore, calls for the building of wider inter-governmental multi-stakeholder ownership and support, asking the AUC to mobilise and engage all member states, key civil society-based groups, the private sector, regional economic blocs, think tanks and “potential regional and international funders” in the formulation of STISA-2034.

“Though STISA-2024 was designed or formulated during a period when there was an emerging strong political, scientific and civic constituency for STI in Africa, the process was not participatory enough as key stakeholders such as most of the member states and governments, academies of science, universities, diaspora, civil society groups, international partners, and private sector were not adequately involved,” it observes.

It discloses that the majority of those interviewed for the review – at least 75% of online and almost 80% of those who submitted written submissions – felt there was inadequate stakeholders’ engagement in the formulation of STISA-2024, making it an African Union (AU) bureaucracy-owned document.

This was blamed on the possibility that the AUC did not have adequate financial and technical resources to organise and manage a participatory, multi-stakeholder consultative process.

In addition, a clear roadmap and terms of reference for its formulation – that should have been agreed upon by member states through the then African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology, or AMCOST – was largely absent.

Recommendations

The draft recommends a careful framing of the scope, rationale and priorities of STISA-2034 to sharpen its focus on “objectives and initiatives that produce continental and regional public STI and development goods”.

The process for formulating the strategy should include the preparation of a comprehensive implementation plan with clearly articulated programmes, and with outcomes that align with budgetary allocations. The new strategy and its implementation plan should also align with the AU development blueprint, Agenda 2063’s, next 10-year rolling plan and, specifically, with Sustainable Development Goals targets and indicators.

The draft counsels that STISA-2034 should also cover the social dimensions of the STI-society nexus and governance of new emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI).

“STISA-2034 will be developed at a time of more rapid scientific and technological advances, and in a context of even more global socio-economic and political uncertainty. New technologies such as AI are raising mixed anxieties and expectations – fear and hope,” it explains.

To ensure that the technologies are effectively governed, a strong “STI-society contract should be established”, borrowing from the experiences of the UN and bodies such as the EU which are instituting different regulatory frameworks.

“In this regard, it is recommended that the AU should establish its own and join various international platforms for intergovernmental dialogues on new technologies. This will need greater engagement of civil society and scientific communities,” the draft further advises.

Notably, the report acknowledges that Africa’s scientific and innovation performance has improved over the past decade, as evidenced by increasing scientific publications and patent applications.

Concern over intra-Africa collaborations

It expresses concerns that there are still few intra-African joint or co-publications, as most of the growth in scientific productivity is due to local researchers collaborating with non-African researchers, mainly from the Global North.

“While international research collaborations involving African researchers are important, it is critical to strengthen intra-African research collaborations and scientific productivity. The same applies to innovation, by increasing more intra-African public-private research and development partnerships for technology development and commercialisation,” it adds.

In addition, it calls for fast-tracking the operationalisation of the statute of the Pan African Intellectual Property Organization, or PAIPO, and the establishment of platforms for Africa public-industry research and innovation collaborations.

This would help with a more centralised and better organised patent development and management process.

The continental body should also promote pan-African innovation summits and other events through regional economic blocs and forums.

The role of the African scientific community in Africa, especially through advisory mechanisms, needs to be covered in the strategy.

“There was consensus, from the inception of this review exercise, that it should be cast in a broad context of the changing global geopolitical landscape and African macroeconomic conditions, on the one hand, and of the effects of the AU reform on internal capacity to conduct a smooth implementation of STISA, on the other hand,” the draft adds.

The review was conducted by the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, and the AUC.

It is authored by a group of 11 experts, with Professor John Mugabe of the University of Pretoria as the team leader, and ACTS executive director, Professor Tom Ogada, as the deputy.