Funding Research in Africa: Landscapes of Re-institutionalisation

Introduction

Academic research has been conducted on African research systems since at least the 1980s (Gaillard & Waast, 1988). The area of science, technology and higher education has received increasing attention. Nevertheless, there is still a dearth of studies on the dynamics of higher education or science and technology when compared to other continents and specifically bibliometric studies of publication outputs and trends.

Bibliometric studies in the early 2000s showed very little if any growth in the numbers of publications authored or co-authored by African scientists (Arvanitis et al., 2000; Narváez-Berthelemot et al., 2002; Tijssen, 2007; Waast & Gaillard, 2001). In his paper, Tijssen showed that sub-Saharan Africa’s share of world scientific papers declined from 1% in 1987 to 0.7% in 1996 (Tijssen, 2007). This diminishing share of African science overall did not reflect a decrease in absolute sense, but rather an increase in publication output less than the worldwide growth rate. Africa had lost 11% of its share in global science since its peak in 1987; sub-Saharan science had lost almost a third (31%). The countries in Northern African, Egypt and the Maghreb countries (Algeria, Mauritania, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia) accounted for the modest growth of the African share of the worldwide output during the years 1998–2002.

Bibliometric analysis of research output is only one measure of the relative decline of research and scholarship at many African universities. Numerous studies covering the period between 1990 and 2005 demonstrated quite convincingly that research at former well-resourced and supported institutions, such as Makerere University in Uganda, Ibadan in Nigeria and University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, had deteriorated; that research infrastructure and the general state of laboratories at many institutions had suffered from a lack of maintenance and timely replacement of old equipment. In addition, the generally poor quality of library resources has not improved significantly, with many university libraries not even using automated management systems; the demand for sufficient research funding for ongoing research and scholarship continued as does the need for proper research management and support at most of these institutions (Mouton, 2008).

These studies also provided some initial explanations for these changing trends in scientific performance. The first set of explanations focused on the decline of university research in Africa in the late 1990s. International forces associated with the globalisation of trade in the 1980s and 1990s had devastating effects on national economies. The severe pressure on import capacity and essential economic and social investments increased the dependence of the typical sub-Saharan African country on external aid. Concomitantly, international agencies, most notably the World Bank, privileged expenditure on primary education at the expense of higher education (Psacharopoulos et al., 1986). As a result, many universities were thrown into financial crisis, with laboratories and libraries suffering from a lack of maintenance, timely replacement of equipment, overcrowded lecture rooms, the decline in scholarship and subsequent flight of top academics. Case studies covering the period 1990–2005 demonstrated that research at former well-resourced institutions such as Makerere University (Uganda), Universities of Ibadan (Nigeria) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) had deteriorated (Cloete et al., 2011).

The cumulative effect of funding policies, massive growth in student enrolment in higher education and continuing political instability in many countries created what was termed the ‘de-institutionalisation’ of science (Mouton, 2008). The fragility of the academic communities and lack of confidence by authoritarian governments—especially in the Arab countries(El-Kenz, 1997; Hanafi & Arvanitis, 2016)—as well as societies themselves in science produced locally, created a weak ‘social inscription of science’ (Waast, 2006). At the time these studies were conducted, it was concluded that sub-Saharan scientific institutions remained susceptible to political and military upheavals, severely under-resourced and missed articulation of science governance with ministerial responsibilities.

However, more recent studies have shown a reversal in this trend, with Africa’s scientific output increasing in real numbers (CREST, 2020). In addition, its share of world output more than doubled the growth of Africa as far as world science production is concerned (Confraria, 2014; Mouton & Boshoff, 2010; Pouris & Ho 2013; UNESCO, 2015; World Bank, 2014). ¹ Under the auspices of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the African Science, Technology, and Innovation Indicators initiative from the African Union confirmed this trend in Reports entitled African Innovation Outlook (NEPAD, 2019).

Figure 1 shows that Africa has increased its absolute number of scientific articles and reviews from 10,905 in 2000 to 69,657 in 2018. This translates into an increase in Africa’s share of world publications from 1.5% in 2000 to 3.5% in 2018. ²

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Figure 1

Source: CREST analysis of own version of the Web of Science database (February 2021).

Even with a smaller portion of the world literature and a skewed distribution on the continent, its rapid growth of participation in world production surpasses the world growth rates over the same period. This increased contribution to scientific production is particularly true for thirteen major fields measured by indexes of specialisation (Table 1). These fields recorded specialisation index scores of more than 1.5 (with a threshold of at least 2,000 papers for the period 2015–2008). It is especially noteworthy that three fields—tropical medicine, parasitology and infectious diseases—are fields where scientists in Africa are significantly more active compared to the world average scores for other regions.

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Table 1

Specialisation Index Scores for Scientific Fields (2015–2018)

Scientific Fields	Specialisation Index Scores	No. of Publiactions
Tropical medicine	7.45	4,621
Parasitology	4.74	3,963
Infectious diseases	4.11	8,530
Public, environmental and occupational health	2.65	12,170
Agronomy	2.32	3,386
Entomology	2.11	1,857
Water resources	1.85	4,138
Agriculture, dairy and animal science	1.76	1,850
Ecology	1.72	4,495
Plant sciences	1.71	5,615
Chemistry, medicinal	1.59	3,179
Veterinary sciences	1.59	3,118
Health care sciences and services	1.58	2,722

Source: Web of science data. Our own calculations.

These thematic priorities reflect both the material realities within African countries and pre-existing and new partnerships and collaborations in domains where North–South partnerships are dominant. In this matter, single-institution articles (no collaboration) and collaboration between countries of the continent (African collaboration) appear to be negligible compared to articles where there is some collaboration between Africa and the rest of the world (intercontinental collaboration). In fact, single-authored publications have declines from 16% of all papers in 2000 to only 5% in 2019. Conversely, the percentage of papers that involved collaboration with countries outside Africa increased from 46% in 2000 to 63% in 2019. The other interesting trend is the decline in national collaboration (namely, collaboration between institutions within the same country) which has declined over the same period from 38% to 30%. These trends point to the fact that most African countries are not only increasingly collaborating (or at least co-authoring) with scientists outside Africa but also increasingly not co-authoring with scientists in their own countries. Taken together, these trends are another indicator of weak national systems. In strong science systems (such as the USA, UK, Germany and others), national collaborations are at least as prevalent as collaborations with scientists outside these countries (Mouton et al., 2019).

Beyond what bibliometric studies can indicate, research trends on the continent require more in-depth analyses of such partnerships. We hence construct our main argument around three theses: configurations of sources of funding, governance of international funding and structural effects of funding.

Different Configurations of National and International Sources of Funding

Many African governments have committed to increasing their Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD). GERD is generally regarded as a measure of how dedicated a country is to supporting research. Table 2 captures the most recent data on the proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that is expended on R&D in these countries (NEPAD, 2019; UNESCO IUS, 2021 ³ ). The table shows quite clearly that not a single African country has attained the goal of spending at least 1% of GDP on R&D—a target that was agreed upon by all African countries in 2005 and which is repeatedly stated in most national science policy documents.

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Table 2

Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D (GERD) as Percentage of GDP

Countrya	African Innovation Outlook (NEPAD, 2019)	UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2019)
	GERD as % of GDP	GERD as % of GDP
Botswana	0.54 (2013)	0.54 (2013)
Burkina Faso	0.18 (2009)	0.22 (2014)
Cameroon	n/a	0.12 (2015)
Côte d’Ivoire	n/a	0.10 (2016)
Ethiopia	0.62 (2013)	0.27 (2017)
Ghana	0.47 (2008)	0.23 (2007)
Kenya	0.79 (2010)
Malawi	1.70 (2007)	n/a
Mozambique	0.38 (2014)	0.34 (2015)
Namibia	0.40 (2013)	0.34 (2014)
Senegal	0.48 (2008)	0.58 (2015)
South Africa	0.83 (2017–2018)	0.83 (2017–2018)
Tanzania	0.38 (2010)
Uganda	1.17 (2014)	0.17 (2014)
Zambia	0.37 (2008)	n/a
Zimbabwe	0.2 (2005)	n/a

Source: African Innovation Outlook and UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2019).

Note: ^aFor some countries, data do not include the business enterprise sector, private non-profit institutions/organisations or the higher education sector. We have added a second column to include the latest available UIS statistics on R&D investment for the selected countries. We must, however, add an important caveat when inspecting this table. Some of the country data—as submitted to the UIS/UNESCO and OECD—have never been independently validated. This is certainly true for the reported GERD/GDP data for Malawi and Uganda. The reader is, therefore, advised to treat these data with caution.

The second African Innovation Outlook (NEPAD, 2014) reported GERD by funding sources. Government funding of R&D activities is significant. Notably, Ghana’s government expenditure is the highest, accounting for 68% of its research expenditure, and records the lowest expenditure from its business sector at 0.1% in 2010. In the majority of the countries, contributions from the business/private sector are low. The outlier is South Africa, where the private sector contributes just over 35% of the total R&D expenditure. It was also the least reliant on foreign funding, with only 16% being from outside sources. This report indicates, as shown in Figure 2, that some countries such as Mozambique, Burkina Faso and Uganda received more than 50% of their R&D funding from foreign sources.

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Figure 2

Source: ASTII R&D surveys 2010 or latest year available.

To illustrate further this over-reliance on foreign funding, we can cite the example of a large and prestigious research university, the Makerere University, Uganda’s flagship university (Hydén, 2017, p. 97). Of all of Makerere’s funders in 2000–2012, the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology was the only local funder, with less than 1%. ⁴ Like many universities, Makerere has sustained much of its research activities through the assistance of external funders, among which two North European countries (representing 47%), two large private American foundations (19%), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (13%) and the European Union (EU) (4.6%).

Nonetheless, national investments by African governments and reliance on foreign funding appear in various configurations on the African continent, and we examine these patterns as follows. Science granting councils and agencies such as National Commissions for Science and Technology, National Science Councils and National Academies are essential actors in national research systems. They are crucial ‘intermediaries’ in the financial and technical support to R&D in a country. The creation of science granting councils (SGC) and competitive research funds is of a rather recent origin in Africa (Currie-Alder et al., 2018). The past decade shows an increase in the establishment of dedicated councils or agencies. An empirical study examined the strategic priorities, objectives and practices of SGC in seventeen sub-Saharan countries (Mouton et al., 2014). One of the main findings of this study relates to the diversity of science funding institutional configurations. Box 1 shows examples of how these questions are addressed differently according to countries.

Four models capture the most commonly found arrangements for public research funding. First, a simple situation is where the government delegates its funding responsibility to a relatively autonomous body, usually referred to as a National Research/Science Foundation or Council. Although such an SGC receives its funds directly from the government and has to account for it, its autonomy derives from the appointment of a separate Council or Board. This Council or Board establishes structures and procedures to ensure fair, transparent and efficient disbursement of funds to research organisations. An example is the South African National Research Foundation, which is a statutory body with its own council. It receives its funding from Treasury via the Department of Science and Technology (now the ‘Department of Science and Innovation’) and disburses this money through a wide range of instruments to South African universities on a competitive basis. Mozambique has a similar configuration in that the National Research Foundation is directly responsible to the Ministry of Science and Technology. Other countries with similar arrangements are Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Namibia.

In many countries, sector-specific funding agencies exist. In most cases, funding agencies for agriculture and health have developed separately over time, usually reflecting the priority allocated to these common domains. In addition, sector-specific agencies are rooted in inter-departmental rivalries, which led governments to establish different funding councils or foundations for different sectors. An example of this sector-differentiated model is in South Africa where three bodies have a statutory responsibility for research funding: the National Research Foundation (see above), the Medical Research Council (reporting to the Department of Health) and the Water Research Commission (reporting to the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry). Another is Burkina Faso where three National Funds report to their respective ministries: Research and Innovation for Development (reporting to the Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation), Education and Research (reporting to the Ministry of Secondary and Higher Education) and Research in Health (reporting to the Ministry of Health).

A different configuration is the embedded model. According to this model, it is typical to have either a sub-department or directorate within a Ministry or Department of Science and Technology or a Funding Programme administered by a Ministry or Department. In this case, the Office is an extension of the government with no clear autonomy or independence from the Ministry or Department in charge. This is seen in particular in French-speaking Northern Africa, where the Fund is rather a disbursing agency than an autonomous body, with some confusion between science council and Fund. Another example of this model is COSTECH in Tanzania (see Box 1). In Namibia and Rwanda, these funding agencies are referred to as Commissions.

Finally, a configuration is where universities receiving funds directly from various sources other than government. These are typically international funders, foundations, development agencies ⁵ and NGOs, ⁶ which are not necessarily specialised in research. In practice, we find many variations of configuration. These are hybrid models where diverse funding institutions, national or foreign, public or more and more private, co-exist. Empirically, the study by Mouton et al. (2014) also found cases with very little or no co-ordination or interaction between these separate funding channels, a situation that seems to be closely related to the large array of international funding sources.

The Complex Governance of International Funding

The variety of funding sources is not a new thing. At the beginning of our century, a study of African scientists (Gaillard & Furó Tullberg, 2001) had identified 214 sources of foreign funding supporting research activities in sub-Saharan Africa. The main funding sources, measured in occurrences of projects, were USAID, EU, the French cooperation, and World Health Organization (WHO), followed by International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Agence universitaire de la Francophonie/Université des réseaux d’expression française (AUPELF/UREF), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Bank and UNESCO, in other words mainly international organisations or institutions specialised in ‘research for development’ of the donor countries. Twenty years later, the analysis of actual funders draws a different and complex landscape. For example, Nwaka et al. (2012) derived a list of funders from 119 applications for the selection as Centre of Excellence in health innovation. An analysis of acknowledgements in articles with an affiliation in Niger (1995–2015) indicate sixty-seven different sources of funding, out of which 18% come private funds—with BMG accounting for 9.3% of the mentions (Marou Sama, 2016). A recent study of five Sahel countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad) and Senegal shows that international collaborations represent 79%–91% of the overall production of articles in the Web of Science (1980–2017) and 72% for Senegal, which has a larger overall production and a larger scientific community. All of these research collaborations are supported by some foreign funder, mainly from France, EU and the United States (Costas et al., 2020). The observation of the current dynamics of international funding reveals the growing importance of private foreign partners in the structuration of research in the continent and the multiplication of large initiatives to combine sources of funding.

Private foundations are dominating the scene, being richer than public funders with defined domains of preference in mainly the areas of health, tropical diseases and epidemics (Head et al., 2017; Nwaka et al., 2012). Large private philanthropic sources provide funds through international bodies such as WHO where donors designate how their contributions are to be spent. As the OECD (2018) notes, Africa was the largest beneficiary region, receiving about a third of the global philanthropic aid, most of which was implemented through intermediary institutions, and:

while philanthropic giving remains relatively modest compared to ODA [Official Development Assistance] (5% of the three-year total) and financing for development more broadly, foundations have already become major partners in some specific areas. For example, in the health and reproductive health sectors in 2013-2015, foundations support was the third-largest source of financing for developing countries, following that of the United States and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria […] The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) was by far the most significant philanthropic donor, having provided almost half of total giving (49%). In addition, 81% of the total philanthropic giving during 2013-15 was provided by only 20 foundations. (OECD, 2018, p. 16)

The OECD suggests that ‘official’ donors from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) could engage more systematically with private foundations. Today, many initiatives are a blend of private and public funding, as for example, the African Biosafety Network of Expertise.

Private funding is changing the very notion of ‘agenda setting’ (Vessuri, 2017). The old paradigm of scientists defining the areas of research, based on their experience, is mediated by the dynamics of philanthropic bodies. Donors in the past—public institutions in country members of the DAC—defined the agenda as part of their participation to aid policy. Donors selected the countries they worked with, because of political affinities and colonial past (Gaillard, 1999), as well as because of diplomatic relations with other donors—usually all members of the DAC. Today, in the era of co-construction and multi-agency schemes, few funding agencies would choose to work without engaging in some form of engagement with local authorities. Moreover, ‘cost-sharing’ is actively promoted by the World Bank and encouraged by the OECD, in public–private partnerships being supposed to be the best way forward. Donors and foreign agencies participate in the design and delivery of instruments, under the assumption that ‘co-constructed’, ‘co-owned’, ‘co-funded’ measures between foreign partners and national policy bodies will have a better chance to create scientific research. This has been particularly the case for EU through its International Cooperation projects.

Another change is that these multi-actors/multi-agency initiatives are producing large initiatives. Programmes aimed at multi-annual support and seeking to produce an impact through concentrated resources have led to the idea of centres of excellence and networking initiatives combining public and private sources of funding. A number of initiatives have been instigated to create research centres, such as the AIMS Centres for Mathematical Sciences, to promote ‘clusters of knowledge’ that would allow, in a single location, exchange of ideas, profit from common investments and shared agendas. A well-known initiative, the African Centres of Excellence, was launched in 2013 by the World Bank. Topics range from health and environment to fields like materials, oil chemistry, applied mathematics and computer sciences. These Centres have trained around 3,000 faculty personnel inside the Centres and more than 2,500 faculty nationals from African countries. ⁷ In addition, the West African Economic and Monetary Union designated fourteen centres of excellence. Most of these centres received national and foreign funding, the latter being usually the main source. The process of selecting and approving these centres has been documented in the case of thirty-two centres of excellence in health (Nwaka et al., 2012). These centres of excellence may have differing mandates, but they all participate in training researchers, establishing partnerships with national and foreign universities and businesses, as well as creating synergies at the sub-regional level or promoting management and governance models that are supposed to be models for the partnering universities.

It is important to note also that all these larger initiatives have emerged on the African continent, not only under the auspices of some large (foreign) funder, but as a political effort to create larger African partnerships. The Coalition of African Research and Innovation (CARI) was set up by the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) in partnership with African and global partners. ⁸ The Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA) is another major political science funding platform that was launched in 2015, with the support of the AAS and the NEPAD Agency. ⁹ AESA (2015) was designed to promote the African Union’s Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STIS).

Given the low levels of R&D funding by national governments, it is common to dismiss these political efforts. But building a ‘Coalition’ cannot be attributed exclusively to some political gesture that is void from any real content. On the contrary, the African Union has shown its willingness to translate into reality a common new discourse on the necessity to ‘ensure inclusive participation of all stakeholders’ and to create ‘a highly coordinated, well-funded, innovative African STI community’. Still, the rhetoric on development and science and technology is based on a ‘deficit model’—as signalled by Skupien and Rüffin (2020)—where Africa needs to overcome some of the pervasive deficits. Even without consensus on what are the mains deficits, or who might be held responsible for them, some political engagement seems possible through these large initiatives, and foreign partners are called to participate to building long-term capacity. In other words, we observe ‘strategic advocacy’ in favour of African science, coming from within Africa, and across the continent.

Many initiatives are creating ‘platforms’ that gather stakeholders and funding but remain limited to a specific area of expertise. Such is the case of the Lacuna Fund, an effort to create African data sets and an expertise in machine learning, which began as a collaborative action between the Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org and Canada’s IDRC. The computer science community has been able to develop despite living in such a strongly ‘donor-driven’ environment. The case studies by Harsh et al. (2018) show that both researchers and administrators were able to shape academic programmes and training growing numbers of PhDs, creating a professional identity, defining projects using the funding available and gaining a global competency. Dozens of similar platforms could be mentioned in various other areas of knowledge, acting at a regional level, and usually tied to a donor agency, such as USAID, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) or regional actors. These can be found as ‘projects’ funded by some larger global or regional consortium. These ‘projects’ or programmes are shaped around policy-relevant issues and, in many cases, allow for private-sector participation. This down to the earth structuring, through a close connection of academics with the funding agencies, is probably the backbone of today’s re-institutionalisation of science in Africa.

Foreign funders need to justify their own objectives, and the complexity of the funding scenario is now a matter of intense examination. In a recent report on North–South research partnerships that was commissioned by the UK (now defunct) DFID, J. Dodson selected eleven programmes funded mainly by institutions from the UK, the USA, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands (Dodson, 2017). Her analysis examines these ‘hybrid’ models of funding with foreign funding and/or South management and classifies these partnerships by management structures, based on the distribution of partnering roles and the location of the management of the programme, either in Africa or in the foreign country. She tends to assume that foreign funders gradually introduce a more active African management, based upon experience of funding programmes and capacity building. More South-managed multi-agency programmes should appear. She notes that these are ‘rare’ and offers the DELTAS Programme DELTAS funded by DFID and Wellcome Trust as an example of this trend. The evidence so far seems to contradict the idea of such a ‘trend’. Most foreign funders continue to manage their funding, creating ad hoc structures, except in some rare cases. ASEA seems one of these, since it has the dual benefit of being endorsed by the African governments represented in the African Union and by having a regional experience through the African Academy of Science, which is recognised as such by the foreign counterparts.

An important initiative is the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) concerning research, development and testing of new medicines against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. EDCTP1 has supported 196 research projects, including 57 clinical trials involving more than 100,000 participants. It has also helped train more than 300 African scientists. EDCTP is in phase two since 2014 and is scheduled to receive €2 billion from the European Commission over the next 10 years. ¹⁰ Calls for projects are co-funded by participating entities with the European Commission. EDCTP is built on a provision that allows for research to have multi-year programming with multiple countries partnering. ¹¹ Another example is in the Mediterranean region, the PRIMA initiative under a similar regulation that has been created after two programmes using the ERA-NET funding instrument (project ARIMNet in Agriculture and the generic funding programme called ERA-NET MED) (Zebakh et al., 2022). Finally, the EU has launched, December 2020, programme ARISE (African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence), engaging €25 million funded by DG DEVCO and that will be managed by the AAS (Nairobi). The first call for projects was announced when finishing the writing of this article in February 2021. Similar to the Starting Grants of the European Research Council (ERC), these grants are dedicated to individual scientific excellence in Africa. Grants are geared to young researchers (2–7 years after their PhD) with grants up to €500,000 in all areas of science. ¹²

In addition to these initiatives, the usual scholarship programmes (Marie Curie, DAAD, Newton and others) and bilateral cooperation for research and mobility schemes continue. These more traditional initiatives are based on funding individuals. The Newton Fund, created in 2014, has been designated as a successful venture (Grimes & McNulty 2016). It consists of partnerships between the United Kingdom and fifteen middle-income countries in order to provide appropriate frameworks for support and funding. Within universities, various research-related initiatives can be found. In Tanzania, cooperation between the Muhimbili University College of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and GTZ (German cooperation Agency) in the early 2000s led to the introduction of a first master of public health. In South Africa, achievements regarding the transformation of higher education were accomplished through the South Africa Norway Tertiary Education Development Programme (NUFFIC). Starting in 2000, it aimed at improving access and success of previously disadvantaged students, enhancing the administrative and academic capacity of selected universities and facilitating regional cooperation. When the programme formally ended in 2010, it had—despite a comparatively small amount of foreign investment—catalysed structural changes and institutional linkages spanning sixteen universities in South Africa and the Southern African Development Community region (Gibbon, 2014). In French-speaking countries, Hubert Curien Programmes are co-managed bilaterally by a French and a national committee of the partnering country. ¹³ These programmes are particularly active in the Mediterranean region as well as in Africa and Latin America, and now Asia—over 2,000 projects every year.

Conclusion: Structural Effects of Funding

The changes in the political economy of science in Africa have had structural effects. First on the necessary relation with national institutions. As the legitimate owners of policy in their respective countries, national institutions are the ‘natural’ partners for donors. In some cases, donors provide support in creating policy-making institutions. This was the case of the Millennium Science Initiative in Uganda (World Bank report by Blom et al., 2016), where donors financed approximately 30% of the government’s budget. With its newly reformed Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Sports, the country received funds for research grants, enhancing education programmes and creating linkages between academia and industry. Uganda and Tanzania stand out as preferred investment countries for research development funds. These investments are mainly in the health sector (Head et al., 2017) and development activities (Hunsmann, 2016; Koch & Weingart 2016). The massive focus on health—a result of the Global Health initiatives—is also a consequence of these funding activities, to the detriment of other scientific areas, mainly in the basic sciences (Blom et al., 2016; Chataway et al., 2019; Pouris & Ho, 2013).

A second consequence relates to issues of governance arising from multilateral arrangements. While it is not possible for a foreign agency to define the agenda alone anymore, a foreign funding agency can choose to manage specific funding schemes, or find solutions allowing them to keep some control over the disbursement of funds even though national participation has to be taken into account. Such hybrid management practices become the norm, but large programmes with multiple foreign sources of funding and some local institution, where a national authority participates only as one among others, and not steering the system, pose governance issues. Today, accountability is still stronger on the side of the funders, which also explains that there are very few exceptions where the funder delegates power to the universities or units participating in the projects. Some cases of corruption have shed doubts on the necessary control of external funding and obliged to create adequate tools to this end. ¹⁴ Moreover, management through its measurements and analysis instruments is de facto imposing a dominant position to who manages the metrics and instruments used in evaluating investments and outcomes (Cabane & Tantchou, 2016). Finally, it should be remembered that some large funding agencies tend to use financial indicators such a disbursement as a management guidance. Obviously, this does not take into account specific organisational limitations or issues concerning the difficulty to hire personnel.

Although foreign funders cannot avoid being embedded in cooperation with granting councils, the latter representing of local political forces and interests, the foreign agencies tend to dominate these complex alliances. A series of procedures and efforts within partnerships address the possible ‘unequal power dynamics’ (Dodson, 2017) such as awarding letters sent to all grantees underlining that funding resulted from joint bid, site visits from the funders to localities where funding is used, intensive communication with project coordinators, creation of a specific financial management capacity and so on. All these practices are linked to individual participations. Less is known about the effects at the systemic level. For example, we have only anecdotal evidence, and too few studies, on the way funding is affecting the careers within academia. Funding is also encouraging partnerships among universities and foreign institutions. The growing complexity of the funding landscape should not conceal the fundamental role played by universities. The power engine of the knowledge economy is universities, ¹⁵ and African universities are definitely, albeit at different levels, on a growing track, adopting quality criteria and promoting research, as well as an international policy which includes effective partnership agreements (Cloete et al., 2011, 2015). Universities also are ‘safe spaces’ for diasporic scientists developing ‘transnational higher education partnerships’ with African universities (Dia & Ngwe, 2018; Obamba, 2013). In French-speaking Africa, after many years of little or no effort, a harmonisation of quality is taking place under the auspices of CAMES (Cissé, 2018). Funding has been actively used by University administrators to enhance research and teaching throughout the continent.

Research in Africa continues to rely heavily on foreign funding coming from a large variety of funders, each with their own agendas and objectives. Many of these funders proclaim that their interests coincide with ‘national priorities’ of their African partners, or at least the ‘needs’ of African populations. That these ‘priorities’ and ‘needs’ are not always expressed clearly by African authorities is a concern in terms of neo-colonial modes of functioning through international collaborations. This lack of influence on the research agenda defines a non-hegemonic position in the World science system (Losego & Arvanitis, 2008). Nonetheless, the more recent developments show that there is a growing awareness that African countries should prioritise and define strategic areas for funding. This incipient effort needs to be documented as the proliferation of funding deeply transforms universities and research systems (Arvanitis & O’Brien, 2019).