Professor Tom Kariuki, Dr Eugene Mutimura and Gift Kadzamira
Africa stands at a pivotal moment in its development, holding vast resources and potential. Collaborative efforts between African scientists and global peers have led to significant progress in various sectors, driving scientific innovation tailored to Africa’s needs and sustainable development. However, one crucial area that requires attention is Africa’s Research and Development (R&D) environment.
Data from the World Bank indicates that African countries spend an average of only 0.45% of their GDP on R&D, falling well below the global average of 1.7%. Correspondingly, Africa’s share of global patents remains disproportionately low, implying insufficient innovation and technological advancements originating from the continent. This underinvestment hinders the transformation of Africa’s intellectual capital into tangible products, technologies and services that could boost economic growth, livelihoods and well-being. While international funders and philanthropic organizations have supported Africa-led research and innovation, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the necessity for more domestic funding sources, especially evident in the manufacturing of, and access to, vaccines during the pandemic.
A model that sustains funding for quality R&D
Africa needs innovative ways of unlocking government and industry funding and one such example is Grand Challenges, which is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. The model has been successfully used in Brazil, India and Canada, among other countries.
In Africa, the Science for Africa Foundation’s Grand Challenges Africa initiative has fast become an example of an effective tool to unlock government funding to address widespread development challenges. With its focus of facilitating inclusive multi-stakeholder collaboration within Africa’s research and innovation ecosystem, GC Africa model is enabling a highly coordinated, well-funded and innovative R&D ecosystem by ‘connecting the dots’ to link innovators to funding,technical resources, and other factors that sustain a robust R&D ecosystem.
GC Africa also promotes Africa-led scientific innovations to help African nations achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In Africa, the GC family includes Botswana, Ethiopia, Senegal, and South Africa, with Rwanda and Malawi having joined in May and August 2023.
Unlocking African governments funding
The six African countries have adopted the model to invest in science and innovation, particularly because of the attraction of providing complementary from partners to innovations that address high-priority national development needs from pan-African and global funders. These needs are determined through landscaping exercises with direct engagement of communities and subject experts. GC Africa-complementary funds provide an incentive to African governments to increase R&D funding by complementing investments to national innovators, money often leveraged by additional funders like the SFA Foundation. For example, this year, the Rwandan government to match SFA Foundation and other partner funding for GC Rwanda to support country-based priorities.
As African governments are often the biggest consumer of innovation to address the needs of their citizens, they need to fund research and development, particularly for STEM as it provides a pipeline for innovations and provide an enabling environment for innovations to thrive. Funding is often accompanied by the adjustment of regulations to create a conducive environment for the uptake of innovation and for the participation of young people whose ideas and innovations can promote employment creation. Most of the GC Africa funding has gone to young innovators who are tackling malnutrition and reducing neonatal mortality, among others. Examples are a young Ugandan pharmacist and founder of Neopenda, NeoGuard, a medical device to monitor of clinical vital signs for critically ill newborn babies that has already been adopted in Kenya.
The country-level GC approach has proven to be effective tool in facilitating the adoption of innovation by governments. Africa has the potential to excel in scientific excellence when countries like Malawi and Rwanda drive and support innovations finding solutions to their citizens’ specific challenges. In doing so, GC Rwanda provides an effective platform to unlock Africa’s potential to become a hub of innovation and scientific excellence by investing in local R&D, fostering collaboration across sectors and increasing R&D support from governments, international funders and the private sector. This in turn leads to the building of an environment where African scientists and innovators thrive, generating solutions that have a lasting impact on the continent’s development.
Private sector key in scaling up innovations
But contributions by the private sector to R&D are lagging. While innovation generated by Grand Challenges Africa initiatives fuel enterprise economic growth through its contributions of discovery, development and delivery of innovation on the continent, the sector’s R&D funding in Africa has been minimal. Efforts are being made by the GC country specific initiatives in Africa to motivate the private sector to invest more in R&D. The roles of private sector can include information brokers between innovators and industry through the incentives, such as the incentives introduced for industry to invest in R&D in South Africa.
The private sector companies are more likely to invest resources in Africa if they know governments and other funders are committed to building a sturdy R&D infrastructure on the continent. Likewise, an African government is more likely to reach its stated target for R&D investment (1 percent of GDP) if it knows that private sector partners are on board to help usher discoveries through the development and delivery stages. Fostering and sustaining this synergistic relationship is at the heart of GC models as the participation of the private sector, along with that of African governments and international funders, is necessary to fully realize the potential to create practical solutions to societal challenges, accelerate progress toward meeting the SDGs and increase entrepreneurship and employment opportunities in Africa. The private sector is also critical in innovation, to ensure ideas move from laboratory to market, through commercialisation or public-scaling pathways.
Only through collective, high-quality efforts will widescale, transformative change and progress take root across Africa. Success can be measured by the introduction of and accessibility to ground-breaking products and services that effectively address development challenges, foster economic growth, create employment opportunities, enhance the continent’s global competitiveness, and prioritize the continent’s most vulnerable populations.
The GC model exemplifies the potential of the continent to create and implement innovative solutions to Africa’s highest-priority problems, because the research foci are driven by national development agenda. It is essential for all stakeholders and governments across Africa to respond to the urgency to invest in research and innovation in Africa, to meet the goals and the AU Agenda 2063. These pan-African initiatives highlight the role of STI in Africa’s socio-economic development, and by extension the UN SDGs.
Let us seize this opportunity to unlock Africa’s potential and create a future where African innovations shine on the global stage, transforming lives and inspiring future generations.
Tom Kariuki is the Chief Executive Officer at the Science for Africa Foundation, Eugene Mutimura is the Executive Secretary at Rwanda’s National Council for Science and Technology and Gift Kadzamira, the acting Chief Executive Officer of the Malawi National Commission for Science and Technology.