Science,Technology and Society

‘Science’ has for long been advocated as a key driver of Africa’s post-independence modernisation. This project featured strongly in the Organization of African Unit Lagos Plan of Action of 1980 that called for governments to mobilise 1% of GDP towards building their scientific and technological capabilities. The 1% goal was duly re-affirmed at the African Union Ministers’ Conference of 2003, in Africa’s Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action 2005, and in the 2014 Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa. The contribution presents a high-level assessment of the extent to which these various efforts are revealed in the present continent-wide status of science, technology and innovation (STI). To this end, a high-level appraisal of STI inputs, focus and outputs is assembled. In so doing, the limitations of data and STI indicators must be acknowledged. While there are signs of progress, STI policy has greater rhetorical than operational outcome, raising concerns for African states’ capability to attain the SDGs and shape their participation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This article begins with an overview of recent and current trends in scientific output in Africa. The focus is on how global dynamics and foreign funding support are directly affecting structural aspects of scientific research. It examines the fundamental role of foreign programmes and new forms of academic cooperation in African science. This includes a discussion of multilateral or transcontinental agreements and local universities, the role of private philanthropy and public institutions, trends in domestic expenditure on research and innovation, and how these are linked to the recent positive upturn in scientific production in many African countries.

The concept ‘research excellence’ remains ill-defined in performance assessment and science funding frameworks. This article introduces a framework that distinguishes ‘global excellence’ and ‘local excellence’, which enable a better understanding of ‘research excellence’ in African science. Where global excellence is primarily determined by acknowledged visibility and partially measurable reputation within the (inter)national scholarly community, its local counterpart relates to utilisation of knowledge and know-how among non-scholarly users and communities. Our empirical study of global excellence, based on a citation impact analysis of ‘basic research’ publications during the past 15 years, with one or more African-based authors, shows a large degree of dependence on and cooperation with non-African international partners. More detailed analysis of research-active universities in the African Research Universities Alliance also highlights their large dependency on international resources and funding in their highly cited ‘globally excellent’ research. Our analysis of local excellence focusses on the research objectives of the centres of excellence at universities in sub-Saharan Africa, showing a mix of local and global components. The notion of local excellence is in need of appropriate definitions and further operationalisation. The distinction between global and local excellence, within science funding and research assessment frameworks, offers a more comprehensive view and better understanding of high-end research performance of universities in Africa. Developing quality criteria and performance indicators of local excellence may incentivise researchers to contribute to socio-economic development and innovation.

Kenya’s government has identified science, technology and innovation as key for its national development plan and has started to refurbish its research environment. In this article, we use the world system approach to discuss the largely peripheral relations of Kenya’s science systems to the global science system and to identify indications for Kenya becoming a semi-peripheral scientific player itself within Eastern Africa. While the publications are dominantly oriented towards the Global North and while foreign sources fund nearly half of Kenya’s research and development (R&D), the country starts to become an important country for its neighbours. However, Kenya is still facing an unstable system of integrating significantly more graduate students. These are seen as essential to provide for a sustainable knowledge base that is required for the country’s socio-economic goals. We point to the lack of robust and recent data on R&D in Kenya as an impediment to evidence-based policy-making.

What can be learnt from an application of author-level bibliometrics to the field of agricultural research in Zimbabwe for the period 2012–2016? The study addressed the question by integrating data from three sources: Scopus, the Web of Science and the National Research Database of Zimbabwe. A set of fifteen bibliometric indicators was constructed for 2,873 Zimbabwean authors, of which 248 (9%) were in agricultural sciences and 295 (10%) in multidisciplinary agricultural sciences. The indicators represented three dimensions: volume of article output, scholarly publication outlet and research collaboration. Results are discussed in terms of the Zimbabwean government’s policy for agriculture. Part of the lessons learnt calls for author-level bibliometric studies to connect more closely with the local, regional and global politics of knowledge production.

This article reports on the profiles of the National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) in the three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, through their research policies, human resources, governance, funding and scientific production. A bibliometric study was carried out for the three selected countries based on the Scopus database covering the period between 2005 and 2019. The research shows the distinctive case of Tunisian growth of scientific production compared to the other two countries; it also stresses the universities’ emergence as a major research actor, thus challenging the predominance of the public mission-oriented institutions dedicated to agriculture and veterinary sciences. Finally, it indicates significant differences between the three countries concerning governance and funding, and human resources. Overall, the NARS in the three countries are still very fragile, and a need for significant changes in the research policy making is certainly required to overcome these shortcomings.

At the Second World Internet Conference in 2015, the Chinese President put forward the advocacy of building a community with a shared future in cyberspace. In recent years, with the gradual and widespread recognition of the concept of a cyberspace community with a shared future, how to promote the specific construction of the cyberspace community with a shared future has become a focus. The international community, including Europe and the United States, emerging countries and developing countries, is already in a cyberspace as a whole. Jointly building a community with a shared future in cyberspace can better deal with common network problems, explore the community of cyberspace conflict of cyberspace value, cyberspace security threatened, cyberspace interests game three main practical problems, and explore the benefits and value of cyberspace community for the members of the international community, form from promoting discussion, expand consensus, strengthen construction, seek to collaborative path innovation, can actively promote the effective governance of the global network.