HE funding: African Union, governments urged to step up

The disruption of higher education and research funding programmes in Africa brought about by the suspension of foreign aid by the United States government provides an opportunity for the African Union (AU) to take charge mobilising resources for their financing.

It presents an opportunity for African countries, under the direction of the AU, to build more resilient higher education research ecosystems, well-funded and structured to survive similar future funding shocks in the future.

Furthermore, it’s a wake-up call for the continental body to forge new alliances and partnerships with other countries and regions around the world, to ensure that the two remain adequately funded, and at the centre of the continent’s development agenda, said Dr James Jowi, the deputy executive secretary of the East African Kiswahili Commission, the former principal education officer of the East African Community and the founding executive director of the African Network for Internationalisation of Education, or ANIE.

AU strategy needed

“The African Union may not have a sufficient response at the moment, probably owing to a lack of strategy and foresight for such developments, but one of the ways in which this can be mitigated is to have member states devote more funding to higher education and research, something that has not happened in the past,” he said.

It is also an opportune time for the AU to develop a white paper on the future of Africa’s higher education and research cooperation – especially now that a continental blueprint on the sector, the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA 2016-25), is coming to an end, he added.

“This could be built into the new strategy. It is also a wake-up call for building a resilient and dynamic higher education and research ecosystem on the continent with vibrant centres of excellence and frameworks for supporting intra-Africa higher education and research cooperation,” Jowi explained.

An opportunity for new players

To close the financing gap, the AU could further explore strengthening collaborations with other world regions, including Europe, China and India, he suggested.

“The downside of the aid freeze for the US is that Africa could now develop stronger higher education and research ties with Europe and other emerging economies, especially within the emerging world economies [such as] BRICS. It opens an opportunity for these new economies to reposition themselves to fill in the void left by the USA,” the official told University World News.

This could potentially provide a new “trajectory and path” for higher education cooperation between Africa and other world regions.

‘Significant impact’ on research

Either way, he observed, the impact of the policy change is going to be significant for researchers and higher learning institutions in Africa plus their counterparts in the US.

To survive the sudden disruption, institutions can also take advantage of opportunities such as digitalisation, to minimise some of the risks that would result from the sudden ending of funding, he advised.

In the extreme, he suggested, African countries and their beneficial institutions could consider opening negotiations with the US administration, to “reconsider some of the negative developments”, emanating from the freeze, Jowi suggested.

In Ethiopia, the US Embassy, in partnership with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (EAS), launched a US$522,000 grant to the academy in November 2024, but it now hangs in the balance.

The grant was meant to support the transition of Ethiopian public universities to autonomous governance, building on the success of the first phase, which focused on Addis Ababa University, assisting the universities develop key framework policy documents.

“Education bridges cultural divides, fosters mutual respect, and builds shared commitment to progress,” said Ambassador Ervin Massinga during the event.

Seemingly unaffected is the 2026 Fulbright Research Awards for African Scholars, where the US Mission in Uganda is accepting applications for the programme, with the deadline being 31 March, 2025.

The programme will fund university faculty, administrators, and research institute professionals to conduct postdoctoral research or curriculum development and research at a US academic or research institution during the 2026-27 academic year.

In Kenya, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the main target of the funding cuts, was supporting a three-year Health Equity and Resource Optimization (HERO) initiative to run from March 2023-March 2026, led by Kenyatta University, and implemented in 10 counties.

The project sought to enhance health outcomes through improving domestic resource mobilisation and resource efficiency for sustainable financing of health, social protection systems for health to make healthcare access more equitable, and through the availability and use of quality evidence, to inform policy, planning, and implementation of health services.

At the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, the fate of another three-year research project funded by USAID, through the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish at the Mississippi State University, is unknown.

The 2025-27 project, funded to the tune of US$465,000 was intended to improve economic empowerment and food security of riparian communities in Kenya’s Lake Victoria basin by scaling out “climate-smart, value-added postharvest technologies” for supply chain of Silver Cyprinid fish, locally known as omena.

Governments should also step up

While agreeing with Jowi that the development is a wake-up call for governments, Dr Patrick Mbataru of Kenyatta University believes that governments should step up funding for research and fill the gap that may be left by the US.

“It is time for governments to come up with policies that prioritise domestic research funding to end over-dependence on external funding,” he noted.

Alternatively, universities should craft partnerships with industry or the private sector for funding research while also exploring ways of generating their own incomes internally to fund research.

The institutions should also not neglect funding research despite the cash crunch that many may be experiencing at the moment, he observed.

According to Joseph Njogu, CEO of the research funding platform, Research Beeline, health and medical research across Africa will be most affected by the sudden pause in US aid, noting that the National Institutes of Health accounted for up to 70% funding of all US government research funding on the continent.

This has been through collaborative initiatives between US and African institutions, which could still continue somewhat, but with constrained budgets. The reductions, he explained, will mostly target “indirect research costs”, money that does not go to research directly, but to costs supporting research such as the purchase of vehicles.

“These amounts are being reduced by the new Department of Government Efficiency from 15% in some cases to as little as 7% of total amounts allocated to a project,” he explained. “With this kind of reduction, some American universities might find applying for collaborative projects outside their country to be unattractive, and this will affect projects in African universities,” he added.

Either way, the drastic actions by the Trump administration were a wake-up call and an opportunity for African governments to relook at their research funding models, The aid turbulence will force African governments to take another look at research funding, with a view to raising allocations to at least 1% of their GDP, as per their existing commitment within the AU.

While China has been growing her spending on research and development (in recent years, its spending only accounted for about a half of what the US allocated to the higher education sector, and its spending pattern largely funding initiatives within its own boundaries meant that it was not an alternative to withdrawn US spending).

On the other hand, while European Union countries, put together, were relatively “impressive” spenders, and funded initiatives abroad, the bloc still spent less than China.

“Overall it’s okay to say that research in many institutions and places in Africa will be hard to survive without the US money,” he said.